The Apps Are Too Damn Big ⇥ birchtree.me

Matt Birchler:

“App thinning” is not a magic bullet that erases this problem though, as Facebook Messenger, which shows as being 154 MB, still downloaded 99MB of data for its update.

Of note, Apple does not allow you to download apps or updates that are over 100 MB, and the only app update I was not able to perform was for Facebook. The Facebook app is advertised as being a whopping 251 MB app, and I don’t know what the update size is, but it was over 100 MB. Has Facebook changed so much in the past 3 days since an update that it needed to replace over 40% of its code?

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And of course, Facebook has such great release notes for each of these updates that really justify why these updates are so critical…

I’d hate to add a roadblock for developers issuing app updates, but I really wish Apple would approve their change logs. It could even be automated: if a change log is exactly the same as the previous one, reject it. If any developer wants to send me hundreds of megabytes of updates every couple of weeks, the least they could do is explain what they’re changing.