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I will be making an iPad app with many images (embedded) and it will be around 2gbs. I have made apps this size before for b2b with no issues. My question is does this 2gb limit Apple has extend to the downloading of new content packages? So the app ships much like a magazine app - at about 30-50mbs, say. And then you can download packages that might make the entire app 12gbs.

malaki1974
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  • That's certainly a lot of images, try compressing them (without quality loss) by referring to my answer here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/11350626/814730 – Sam Spencer Dec 15 '12 at 19:51
  • Surely there's a more efficient way than downloading massive packages? You may want to consider using a different format, rather than try to work around physical limits on storage. – CodaFi Dec 15 '12 at 19:55

2 Answers2

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Apple's app size limit (50MB currently) only applies to mobile downloads, but not to WiFi downloads or purchases on your computer. There are a number of apps available today that exceed this limit (>1GB for some navigation packages that ship with custom offline map data).

However, that's not really a good user experience. Since there is still no incremental update system available on the App Store, the users will have to download the full app after every update.

Downloading this content from your own server after purchase might be a better option, if you can afford the traffic, since that data won't be cleared during an update. Make sure you disable iCloud backups for it though.

That being said, I wonder what kind off app requires 2GBs of essential images. Are you sure every user needs all of them at the same time? Can't you just download what is necessary?

DrummerB
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    @omz do you have any proof or release notes showing this? When I update large apps on my iPad iOS 6 it just redownloads. – Sam Spencer Dec 15 '12 at 20:01
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    AFAIK delta updates are available only for iOS, only system can use this option. – Tomasz Wojtkowiak Dec 15 '12 at 20:06
  • I was pretty sure that this was mentioned in some WWDC session, but I can't find it now and I've only found some speculation by googling, e.g. here: http://www.cultofmac.com/184244/latest-ios-6-beta-makes-app-store-updates-super-snappy/ – It's weird that there doesn't seem to be any verfiable information on this, I guess it wouldn't be so hard to use a proxy to see what actually gets transferred when you download an update... – omz Dec 15 '12 at 20:15
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The size limit of 2 GB only applies to the app itself, i.e. what's downloaded from the App Store. The size of things that the app downloads once it's installed is not really limited, but you must make sure that large data is not backed up via iTunes/iCloud, otherwise your app will very likely be rejected for violation of the iOS data storage guidelines.

omz
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