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Apple Increases Maximum App Size from 2GB to 4GB
- mikesena 12y agoFINAL FANTASY 7 HERE WE COME!
- joelennon 12y agoOddly 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.
- rasz_pl 12y agoff7 was originally 3 CDs, and probably half of that was for fmv in outdated inefficient format
- test1235 12y agoYou seem to be implying that 3CDs is more than 4GB?
- rasz_pl 12y agoless than 2GB
- wodenokoto 12y agoAlso there's a lot of duplicated stuff on the CD's.
- drei29 12y agoThe 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.
- bennyg 12y agoHuge iPad games coming in the future.
- TillE 12y ago4GB 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.
- martinald 12y agoYes, I think thew new battlefield is something like 70GB, so 4GB is pretty small.
- spain 12y agoAt 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-Dev-Explains-The-Games-35-GB-of-Uncompressed-Audio http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/132922-Titanfall-D...
- thirsteh 12y agoIronically 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.
- jjoonathan 12y agoThe 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!"
- Arsenije 12y agoAre they into storage business?
- matznerd 12y agoWhat vertical will this benefit most, aside from gaming?
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 12y agoSample libraries, maybe.
- zorpner 12y agoSome 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 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tomtom-europe/id355680531 ), but I don't know offhand if that's putting any pressure on them.
- matznerd 12y agoThis was my next guess, apps with huge databases that are mean to be queried offline etc.
- Scuds 12y agoeducational software usually needs lots of assets
- shinymark 12y agoNon-gaming mobile VR perhaps. I can imagine experiences that would benefit from large data sets.
- matznerd 12y agoYes 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.
- Steko 12y agoWe've seen some albums and books released as apps, why not larger film/tv projects.
- Someone1234 12y agoNeat. 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-16gb-iphone-ipad-storage http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/31/7474947/apple-sued-over-1...
- apike 12y agoBelieve 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.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- rgbrenner 12y agoYoure 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.
- arthurfm 12y ago> 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.
- Geee 12y agoCan someone explain why there is still the 100 MB cellular limit?
- Someone1234 12y agoBecause 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.
- gergles 12y agoSame 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 $.
- wvenable 12y ago...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.
- Someone1234 12y agoThat's actually a very clever way of bypassing it.
- mahyarm 12y agoThere is still a max executable size of 80MB although right?
- chrisdroukas 12y ago60, actually. Page 78: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/LanguagesUtilities/Conceptual/iTunesConnect_Guide/iTunesConnect_Guide.pdf https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Langua...
- mahyarm 12y agoThis 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
- 6stringmerc 12y agoKind 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.
- mcmancini 12y agoIt 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.
- jkestner 12y agoOr if Apple could just pluck those @3x files out of the bundle before it downloads.
- rys 12y agoThey can't do that without resigning it on your behalf, which would probably be bad.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- BinaryIdiot 12y agoI 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.
- mvelie 12y agoDevelopers 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.
- mrfusion 12y agoWould this be enough to store Wikipedia locally on the phone?
- bowmessage 12y agoNo, according to this article[1], the English database alone is 10 GB compressed. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
- rasz_pl 12y agoand about 78GB for media data(images), I know because I run my own offline wiki :o)
- glhaynes 12y agoNote 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.
- robterrell 12y agoThis 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.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- RayLau135 12y agoI 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
- LarryMade2 12y agoCurious, what small screen apps need or could use that much space?
- collyw 12y agoThat'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?
- wodenokoto 12y agoComputer 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.