View Full Version : App updates on iphone
gemma10
1st Sep 2016, 15:37
Have had my iphone 5c for over two years now and am quite pleased with the product, however the number of Apps I have downloaded in the past cause concern, because daily some require updating. For example, today bbc sport 14mb, Messenger 107mb and youtube 62mb. Now I know this phone has 64Gb space, but these update figures seem alarming. Am I right or wrong in thinking that say if I update bbc sport with 14Mb then the whole App has increased by that ammount, or, is say 14Mb deleted first and then and then the new bits added to make the App improved or more stable. Surely we cant all keep adding updates ad infinitum or everything will just grind to a halt. :confused::confused:
Settings -->> General -->> About, will tell you what you've got on the phone.
andytug
1st Sep 2016, 17:16
It depends on the app, but the amount downloaded doesn't mean that's how big the app will be on the device, there'll be some compression done to make the download smaller, plus once the downloaded file itself runs the resulting app is usually a bit bigger anyway.
If you've got 64GB app space should not be a worry, in general it's video that takes up most room by some way as the files for that are relatively huge.
(to check use the method above)
safelife
2nd Sep 2016, 05:08
App updates are normally not incremental (or patches), you just download the whole thing again.
Never understood why the app store can't just produce and provide you with a "delta" between what you had and what is up to date...
gemma10
2nd Sep 2016, 12:32
safelife- that makes sense and is what I was attempting to explain. However I did use the above method ,before and after the download of a 107Mb Messenger and the overall result was a decrease in available space.
andytug
2nd Sep 2016, 13:36
Also the space taken up by the app includes anything cached, in the case of Messenger that's any messages/photos that came via Messenger stored on the device for offline viewing.
My phone is Android and the Messenger download is 49MB, on the phone currently takes up 173MB.
Facebook itself is even worse, when they updated it to store offline content about 12-18 months ago, it went from taking up 40-50MB to these days nearly 400.
Never understood why the app store can't just produce and provide you with a "delta" between what you had and what is up to date...Because storing deltas between every possible combination of app versions, or generating them on the fly for each download, is a significant amount of work, whereas bandwidth is cheap (at least for Apple).