I am trying to develop a BlackBerry game and I'm facing several problems related to app-size (the game data needed for all levels and all characters has more than 20 MB size on disk)
I understood that the app size can't exceed 5 MB. Does anyone know if this limitation can be somehow avoided?
During my research, I found 2 solutions but I am not sure if these are allowed by RIM:
the game data to be separated by the game /application itself, in small packages under 5 MB. After user downloaded the game and lunched it, at a certain point in the game, packages will be downloaded, one by one, from publisher's server or BlackBerry World (preferable), to device's memory or device's memory card. From here, the app can access the data anytime it's needed. I already tested by uploading resources to the device and it worked fine. I just need to know if this is allowed or not.
release 4 small games with the size under 5 MB each but share the profile, score from one application to another. I tested this method, too. and the result was OK for me.
Related
I created my first app back in July. It came out to be 55mb. I have recently noticed that the Documents and Data section for my app is 150mb, nearly 3 times the app size. Doing more tests I have realized that each time I play the game it increases by 1mb. It is now at 170mb.
I am using Unity 5.6.1p4 and Google Admob.
My app does not download any update files to run the game so that isn't the issue.
I have a couple of guesses but none seem very likely:
1) My game is only about half as optimized as it should be. I still use a lot of instantiate and destroy. An other post said that the memory issue is due to Apple's inability to garbage collect. That is a possibility but I cannot understand why the data from instantiate/destroy would be cached. I also find it hard to believe no one else has had that issue.
2) When the game first starts, it automatically loads a banner ad and a video ad so that there is no delay when the user first requests a reward video. Some people have said that Google Admob caches ads so there is less data usage. That seems like it would cause some increase in file size but 170mb is too much data to be cached. Again I find it hard to believe no one would have complained to Google about this before.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I cannot figure out what would be causing it. If you are interested in seeing the problem first hand, the App Store link is https://appsto.re/us/nco9gb.i
Ok, here is my findings: This is either an issue for older phones, or iOS 10.x.
However, I do not know which. I am able to test iOS 10 on older phones (5, 5s and ipad 1). I am not able to find any newer device still running iOS 10. This memory glitch does not seem to happen on iOS 11. I was able to test it on 3x iphone 6s, 2x iphone 7 all running iOS 11.It is not as clear as I would like it to be but iOS 11 does not appear to have the memory issue. As much as I would like to find the cause and fix it, I think the majority of people should be safe because they update.
Version 1.0 of my app has finally been completed. It's a simple application with the ability to view multiple leaflets and links to videos from a charity-based organisation. I've uploaded it to iTunes Connect for the final build, but I'm seeing a "App Store File Size Warning" in iTunes Connect.
The app itself contains 220 images (each has an average size of 500 Kb but some much smaller). The idea of the app is to have the charity's leaflets all accessible within the app in an offline state (hence why they're not downloaded from a server somewhere, etc).
The app itself also contains links to the companies videos. So the videos itself are not in the app, but rather links to the videos are populating the app's UITableViewCells.
Reading many questions about App Store size reduction, I have moved 1200 titles and URLs for the videos to text files rather than storing them in code. I have reduced the sizes of the images (they can't be reduced anymore because they will become low resolution). I'm just not too sure what I can do to get to the required limit? Or, could I still submit as it's only a warning and not an error?
For example, I downloaded a game today that was 190Mb. How does that get around this?
The app supports iOS 7, 8 and 9, so I can't use App Thinning just for that. I see some information on this: Max size of an iOS application but it's not new, etc.
Is it possible for me to bypass the warning in iTunes Connect and submit anyway? (I'll submit after the ITC X mas break).
Any thoughts on this would be really appreciated.
That won't cause any issue. If your app is less than 100 MB the warning won't be there. Apple prefers to keep the IPA size below 100 MB for keeping the app mobile data friendly (To download using mobile data).
There are several ways you can reduce the size:
Use App Thinning
Implement an one time download mechanism in your app, through which download the files on first start (I'm doing such a mechanism in 3 of my app, that needs around 300 MB of resource for proper working)
You can read more techniques in Reducing the size of my App
We've developed a Photo Editing extension to edit user's photos. But the photos which user take have large high-resolution. When editing them in extension, it will cost about 100-200MB memory and extension get crashed. But we can't reduce user photo's resolution, how to apply more memory in Photo Editing extension?
I have the same problem. I'm writing an extension to complement my photo editing app. My filter pipeline is relatively complex; it uses a maximum of 6 image-sized textures at a time. However, in the main app I can even process the full camera image size of 8 MP (iPhone 5s) without running into memory issues.
In the extension, I use the display-sized image given by the framework for displaying the preview of the filter to the user, which works perfectly fine. But when I try to apply my filter to the original image as soon as the user taps Done, the extension crashes with the error message Terminated due to Memory Error (in Xcode). I even refactored my shaders and texture management code to only use half (!) of the previous amount of memory, but the extension keeps crashing.
I know Apples guide explicitly mentions lower memory limits:
Memory limits for running app extensions are significantly lower than the memory limits imposed on a foreground app. On both platforms, the system may aggressively terminate extensions because users want to return to their main goal in the host app. Some extensions may have lower memory limits than others: For example, widgets must be especially efficient because users are likely to have several widgets open at the same time. [...]
Keep in mind that the GPU is a shared resource in the system, and so app extensions don’t get top priority. For example, a Today widget that runs a graphics-intensive game may give users a bad experience on both platforms and is likely to be terminated because of memory pressures.
But I don't see how complex photo editing apps are supposed to work with that. The current memory constraints are clearly too high. The only option I see right now is to reduce the image size when saving results and prompt the user about it and tell him/her to use the main app for hi-res export ... which totally misses the point of the extension. I hope Apple will raise the limits before the final release of iOS 8.
UPDATE
I just updated to the iOS 8 GM release and the GM release of Xcode 6. Now everything works perfectly fine! I am able to process 8 MP images without any memory warning now.
i need a confirmation about the file size of iOS apps which use the "In App Purchases" model. I gathered some informations after surfing for a pair of hours, even on StackOverflow, but i need to be sure about what i found (i am new at iOS development, please understand).
As for many coders out there, and expecially game developers, i have to take the installation package size into consideration. For my game, i suspect my graphics will require over 40 MB, but i'll try to stay under 50, to allow over-the-air download.
The ideal scenario would be :
-The user tests the game. Since the package is under 50 MB, he/she can download it without Wifi. Download and use of the game would be free (freemium);
-The user likes the game. 3 In-App-Purchase items are available : 2 related to a package which size is below 50 MB, and 1 which size is above (so Wifi only);
-The user can buy from everywhere (OTA) the 2 littler IAP items, and connect the iThing to Wifi and get, for a higher price, the larger one (order is irrelevant).
Long story made short, my questions are :
I'm almost 100% sure about this, but not 100%, so please confirm : can i make Apple host the IAP files, instead than having to setup a different server and uploading the files on it ?
I understand the app package can be 2GB, and that i have to keep it below 50MB to allow over-the-air download. But can i setup at least an IAP downloadable file which is over 50 MB ? (I suppose yes, but please confirm, it's crucial for my design; i didn't find this information at all)
Sorry if these questions sound silly but i'm in the design phase and knowing how much contents i can include in the game is very important for my next steps.
Thank you
The maximum size for in-app purchase content hosted by Apple is the same as the maximum allowed size for apps, which is currently (as of 2015) 4 GB.
My app uses hosted content that's as high as 900 MB, and I haven't had any problems with files that size. Of course, these are over the limit for downloading over cellular, but that's not a concern for my project.
Additionally, from Apple:
Each developer account can create up to 10,000 in-app purchase
products across all the apps in the account.
Reference: https://help.apple.com/itunes-connect/developer/#/devb57be10e7
Here is a question that had been bothering me. The other day I checked my wife's phone and pinterest app was eating up 2 GB of space while the actual app in the appstore is 26.8 MB. I know there must be user / log / crash data that is dumped in its apps document directory but that got me thinking how many other apps on her phone had large amount of user data stored compared to what the app size is in appstore.
So here are my questions of how to do all this using objectiveC
Sample Xcode iHasApp display's all the available apps installed on a device. Is there a way I check how much space they are taking in GB/MB etc?
Is there a way I can go query that app build size in appstore and tell the user hey its only X MB in appstore?
I know I can get to all the app installed on a device is there a way I can check when was an app last launched or used by a user?
Can I check how much space photo / video and music is taking up?
What I am trying do in the end is to see if I can make an app that shows user what they got installed on their device and make some informed decisions themselves.
So far all I am able to find is how to check total used and free space on a device and get a list of all apps installed.
Sample Xcode iHasApp display's all the available apps installed on a device. Is there a way I check how much space they are taking in GB/MB etc?
No. The APIs being used by iHasApp can only be used to check whether selected applications are present -- basically, all you get to ask "is ThisApp installed?", and you can build up a partial list of installed applications by running that check for a large number of common applications.
There is no way to get launch or disk usage information for other applications. I'm not sure last launch is even tracked at all by the device.
With this in mind, most of your other questions are irrelevant. It is not possible to do what you're after from an iOS application.