App, OS and other file sizes are big deals in bandwidth-constrained environments. Canada has a number of remote communities with satellite uplinks, so every upd

App, OS and other file sizes are big deals in bandwidth-constrained environments. Canada has a number of remote communities with satellite uplinks, so every update means the whole town needs to download them independently. While some cos have “appliances” that ISPs can install that’ll dramatically reduce back haul bandwidth usage, I’m unaware of any that make any that work for a small community or aircraft. SSL really impacted the use of general-purpose proxies to save bandwidth. Maybe more torrent-based schemes for app stores and others could fill this gap. > Apple also supports incremental downloads, meaning you can download a “diff” of app binaries in some cases (also amazing!), but this is even harder to measure on an actual device. In my case I was trying to download the United app for the first time on a runway before my flight took off. What would be interesting is if Apple did this diff between apps, since I’m sure a lot share frameworks and other bits.