Apple Increases Maximum App Size from 2GB to 4GB | Hacker News Reader

Apple Increases Maximum App Size from 2GB to 4GB

developer.apple.com

69 pointsdavidbarker78 comments

Neat. Now when will they dump this antiquated 16GB lowest tier for their devices? About 20% of that is lost to the OS, and an addition 5-15% when you download an OS update [0].

While there are Android devices who still come with 16GB, most flagships have moved to 32 GB baseline and may or may not come with a micro SD card slot on top of that.

Apple's devices with 16GB are actually legitimately painful to use after about a year or more. They really are ruining the customer experience, and I bet if Jobs were alive they would have moved to 32GB long ago.

It isn't like Apple needs the money.

[0] http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/31/7474947/apple-sued-over-1...

You seem to be forgetting that if you want more storage you are free to choose a larger model.

There are a range of customers for whom the built in apps, plus a few big names like Facebook and Uber, and maybe google maps, are more than adequate.

Yes, 16GB isn't great for large music or photo collections, but those are solved problems. You can choose from a wide range of streaming options for music, and you can use iCloud Photos to offload your photo storage from the device.

Perhaps what Someone1234 would like, is if the 32GB model became the baseline in both pricing and model--instead of the 16GB model.

Though the latest update on iOS for 16 iPads was specifically to make updates in the future smaller. (I have one and that's what was described in part of the update)

The problem is that Apple's pricing is pretty static: "lowest end is this, next is that, next is that."

Doesn't matter -what- the lowest end is, they seem to always set the price in the same place.

Upshot is that dumping 16GB has a pretty high chance of effectively bringing the price of the entire line down a notch.

So this whole line of argument simply boils down to wanting a 64GB iPhone to be $100 cheaper?

(edit: downvote by all means, but I don't see any other logic at work here - anyone feel like explaining?)

Why not ? The storage upgrades have a BS price that haven't changed anyway.

Why is the price BS? It doesn't seem to inhibit sales.

While true, this is a pain point for Apple and app developers. The upgrade rate to iOS 8 is hurt by the large number of people that do not have enough disk space left available on their phone. In retrospect, 16GB is penny wise, pound foolish for Apple.

I agree, I imagine Apple will be doubling their memory offers now.

I don't know why you're being downvoted. Everything you said is true.

I wonder who the downvotes are from?! Personally, I've got a 16GByte iPad. I find this plenty, and I appreciated the lower cost compared to the 32 or 64GByte version. People like me do exist!

I use it all the time, but only for browsing the web and for Twitter, and sometimes I'll try the odd game that's getting good press. I don't use it for photos and I don't use it for music.

Believe it or not, the iPhone 5c ONLY comes in 8GB. On a brand new iPhone 5c, you would be able to just barely install one of these 4GB apps. The user experience tradeoff of selling new phones with so little storage seems very short sighted.

Youre just not the type of user that those devices are made for.. Personally, I always buy the smallest iPhone because I store very little on my phone (like 1-2gb total).

I see no reason I should pay more so that my phone has 28gb free instead of 12gb

If you want more space.. Thate why they sell larger sizes.

Edit: and if there weren't plenty of people like me.. Apple wouldn't be able to sell it and would stop making it.

> I see no reason I should pay more so that my phone has 28GB free instead of 12GB

If Apple made the 32GB the base model and sold it for the same price as the 16GB model, you wouldn't have to pay any more money. It's about time they did this since flash memory is dirt cheap.

> If Apple made the 32GB the base model and sold it for the same price as the 16GB model, you wouldn't have to pay any more money.

That's not how {Apple,the World,business,life} works, young grasshopper.

Multiple smart phone manufacturers have already begun doing exactly that, young grasshopper.

Note 4, Nexus 6, Lumia 930, YotaPhone all come with a minimal capacity of 32GB.

You're not comparing like-for-like: Samsung, LG and Microsoft all produce other devices that come with less than 32GB of space. If you need 32GB, Apple provides a device for that (as do other manufacturers). If you don't need that much but want an Apple device, you can buy a 5C.

First of all, short and long sightedness are part of the world industry. Giving people a bad experience on an 8gb device can set you up for future resentment. Not all consumers understand what 8 or 16gb means and trust any iPhone to be good.

Moreover Apple could easily double their smallest tier and still have the largest margins in the industry.

not sure thats correct. i have a 16gb 5c, and when I bought it the guy who sold it to me said for an extra £15 you can get 16gb.

I bet if Jobs were alive they would have moved to 32GB long ago.

I know this is just an aside, but it's really tiring to see people evoke "Steve Jobs would never have stood for this!". You have no idea, and he isn't around to tell you.

Fair enough.

But everything I know about the man, he was all about the user experience from top to bottom, end to end. Apple's entire modern reputation is built on that "promise."

The iPhone and iPads deliver on that in many ways, but the 16GB models and the laughable 8GB 5c, fail and they fail hard. The user is often distracted by this limitation, and many have remarked that they haven't install iOS 8 (Apple's latest and greatest) because they cannot.

Jobs was definitely around while they were shipping 16GB and even 8GB devices. But that was a very long time ago and the OS data and apps both continue to grow, while the devices sit dead in the water.

> many have remarked that they haven't install iOS 8 (Apple's latest and greatest) because they cannot.

This is the key bit, and it already has caused some changes from Apple - 8.1.3 requires less free space to update.

The 8gb 5c is a terrible user experience though, and it really surprises me that they haven't discontinued it.

Yeah but speculating on what a dead man would do is sort of talking about nothing. It reminds me of when people say what Ronald Reagan would do in a situation.

But yes I wish they would offer more storage on their product. The 8GB 5c was a weird step backward. Hopefully the next round of phones will address some of the flak they have gotten over storage.

It would be really great if somehow, automagically, a downloaded app would trim away all the unneeded assets for the device it's installed on. My iPad 2 doesn't need 3x iPhone 6 Plus assets.

Or if Apple could just pluck those @3x files out of the bundle before it downloads.

They can't do that without resigning it on your behalf, which would probably be bad.

I think a better solution is simply providing a bundle for each device type it should be installed onto. It would save a lot of space and could easily be automated when generating the bundles.

Developers can also do images in resolution independent ways for certain types of image assets used in the apps, like icons. You wouldn't be able to do these for photos, but it would help.

Also for our app, when it first loads we detect your screen size and then download assets that match for that screen size only when needed.

Kind of interesting this is around the time that Android seems to be working out some of their Audio Latency kinks.

This is good news for musicians. I've been very, very pleased with the music software and hardware products catering to music production / performance. Some catalogs nearly have a 2 page spread devoted to just iOS components. Due to circumstances regarding my damaged Lenovo laptop, I prefer to travel and work out new tunes on an iPad 2 using an Akai LPK25. Not that I'm the first or best, but I managed to put together an entire EP using just those with some headphones while on a family trip and waking up before the rest of the group (San Antonio Riginals).

I still have yet to try out a new Line6 amp interface product I picked up on a SDOTD for $10. Seems like every major player has embraced iOS. Between Garageband and Figure, I'm a very happy customer. Even the entertainment stuff like DJay and Traktor are thoroughly workable. Glad to see this.

Can someone explain why there is still the 100 MB cellular limit?

Because Apple "partners" with the cellular networks (in the US) and these networks asked them to. It used to be 50 MB.

And before someone tells me off, if it isn't down to cellular network agreements, then why can't people disable it? And why does it not exist in other regions?

The Play Store has this same limitation by default, however you can disable them in that case just be flipping a single option.

Same reason why they added the malfeature to phone home to your carrier and ask permission to color your bits the tethering color; it all ultimately boils down to $.

Like most business then, I guess

Unless you jailbreak, then you can tether all you want, but you still have to use an app for it instead of just enabling tethering in settings.

...and no way to turn it off! I've actually used one iPhone as a Wifi hotspot to download apps on another iPhone to get around this limit.

That's actually a very clever way of bypassing it.

Although the part requiring two iPhone is a bit of a downer...

Are you doing that with 2 iOS 8 devices?

I ask because that actually fails on an iPad running iOS 8 if you're tethered to something via bluetooth instead of WiFi, even if the other end isn't an iPhone or a mobile device at all.

I only noticed this because my iPad 2, which has no cellular connection, recently told me it couldn't download an app update over the cellular connection it doesn't have, and that I should connect to WiFi instead. In reality it was connected to my Macbook via bluetooth and through it, my DSL connection at home, not an iPhone. And yet still... blocked app updates. Seems they assume any bluetooth connection is a mobile tether.

I have my iPad connected like that because WiFi on this device in iOS 8 is horribly broken, and disconnects from the AP 20+ times per day, which causes Netflix streams or anything else long-lived to fail.

It didn't break like that on iOS 7, and the AP here is made by Apple as well so this is multiple levels of absurd, they've had months to fix it or show some sign they care at all, but bluetooth connections work.... sigh.

Cellular providers.

Bluntly, because unscrupulous service providers are charging too much for data.

If you break your cap they make more money, no?

Why is that a consideration for Apple?

This isn't as important as the (not changed) 100 MB over-the-air download limit.

Please, Apple: raise the OTA limit.

For games, with Apple mandating fat binaries with both 32-bit and 64-bit executables, it's getting really difficult to keep sizes under 100 MB.

I assume this is tied to carrier deals and will only happen as those deals expire / are re-negotiated, so I don't expect a miracle this year, but it's a very serious problem for us right now.

What vertical will this benefit most, aside from gaming?

Sample libraries, maybe.

Some of the GPS apps with mapping data embedded are already very close to the 2GB limit (e.g.: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tomtom-europe/id355680531 ), but I don't know offhand if that's putting any pressure on them.

This was my next guess, apps with huge databases that are mean to be queried offline etc.

educational software usually needs lots of assets

Non-gaming mobile VR perhaps. I can imagine experiences that would benefit from large data sets.

Yes I imagine that VR video and associated games will have to have a lot more data associated with them because of the video content being available/required for 360 degrees.

We've seen some albums and books released as apps, why not larger film/tv projects.

Would this be enough to store Wikipedia locally on the phone?

No, according to this article[1], the English database alone is 10 GB compressed.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

and about 78GB for media data(images), I know because I run my own offline wiki :o)

Note that an app could conceivably be made that would on launch allow you to download all of Wikipedia. This limit is just on the size of the app binary as it's downloaded from the App Store.

That's enormous. The only software I can think that is in those sort of size ranges is a Windows install.

What other software even comes close to that sort of size?

Computer games. I haven't really played PC games since they where sold on CD's so installing steam and a few games from there recently was really shocking.

There is still a max executable size of 80MB although right?

60, actually. Page 78:

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Langua...

This can be frustrating. They add another ISA that we have to bundle into iOS apps that make them %150 bigger. Have a +40MB binary and then you run into a wall by adding arm64

I can think of one app which would benefit - The Simpsons Tapped Out.

So annoying having to wait for 1GB of updates to download before you even get to play the game

Huge iPad games coming in the future.

4GB isn't even particularly huge for games these days. Basically any PC game with lots of voice acting and high-resolution textures will blow past that pretty quickly.

Yes, I think thew new battlefield is something like 70GB, so 4GB is pretty small.

At least with Titanfall coming in at 48 GB (and probably other heavy-weight AAA titles coming out nowadays) the reason for the huge size wasn't really the amount or quality of the assets, but mostly just because the audio assets were uncompressed. According to them it was so that "they could dedicate more system resources to running the game, and less to unpacking audio files." [0]

[0] http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/132922-Titanfall-D...

Ironically the disk IO probably far outweighs any decoding overhead.

Also, from what I understand: Not only did they include raw audio, they included raw audio for every single language, even in the download version.

The US Army has them beat.

About 10 years ago they released a first person shooter called "America's Army." It was free, it was mac compatible, and for a kid that wasn't really supposed to be video gaming that was a killer combination. When they stopped updating the mac version I started poking around the files to see if I could backport some of the maps from the newer PC version to the older mac version. One of the first things I implemented was texture import/export. I wanted it to work on entire folders at a time and I didn't want to rely on EXIF annotations to store the pixel format of textures so I relied on the hack of looking at the histogram to see if an image should be stored in the compressed format.

At first I thought I had a bug: I knew for a fact that some textures were stored uncompressed (RGBA8) and some were stored compressed (DXT3,5) but they were all importing as compressed. Turns out the bug wasn't in my code. Someone had lossfully compressed the textures and then stored the compressed images in an uncompressed format.

I sent the devs an email letting them know how they could save ~50% of their download size at no further loss of quality by re-enabling compression. I never got a direct response but the next day they banned me for hacking. Naturally, when the next version of the game came out the problem still wasn't fixed.

A few years later I told my parents. My father, who had served in the army, just laughed and said "Now that's the Army I remember!"

Holy crap. That's going to be painful for anyone with under about 20 megabit downstream. There are internet plans in Australia that have less quota than that per month.

Can anyone comment on whether the CPU hit from using something like FLAC or Opus would really cause that much of a CPU hit? Especially when you're playing with about 4 threads minimum in an older gaming PC.

(Wouldn't the consoles have hardware accelerated audio too?)

The bit that really irks me is that this is a compromise to help support lower-specced PCs - PCs that probably also have smaller HDs.

Curious, what small screen apps need or could use that much space?

Are they into storage business?

FINAL FANTASY 7 HERE WE COME!

Oddly this was my first reaction too. Thst said, 2gb was always enough to enable Square Enix to deliver FF7 to iOS if they really wanted to, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

ff7 was originally 3 CDs, and probably half of that was for fmv in outdated inefficient format

You seem to be implying that 3CDs is more than 4GB?

less than 2GB

Also there's a lot of duplicated stuff on the CD's.

The Steam PC download for FFVII is 1.2GB so I assume that Square Enix would have had enough space to develop it for iOS before now if they were planning on. The actual game size is around 1508MB.

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