A Bug is Causing Some iOS Apps in the App Store to Appear Bigger Than They Really Are

Some apps in the iOS App Store appear larger than they really are

While some bugs or flaws can be pretty big and lead to potential security risks, there are also the bugs that are pretty minor and are just a minor annoyance.

Luckily for folks perusing the iOS App Store, the latest iOS bug is the latter and not the former. As was first reported on Wednesday by 9to5Mac, it appears that a minor issue within the digital storefront is causing some apps to appear larger than they really are. This relates to the size of the app when it comes to downloading and installing it. In some cases it looks like an app can appear to hundreds of megabytes larger than it really is.

The example provided is Facebook, which shows within the iOS App Store as coming in at just over 500MB in size. However, if you do install the app and check its impact on your device’s built-in storage, it shows that the app is “only” 316MB. That’s 200MB of a difference there, which is certainly not nothing. For someone who might be trying to save space on their handset, that might be enough to keep them from installing the app.

The issue may be what the iOS App Store is reporting, versus what the individual user is actually installing:

“The App Store uses a process called app thinning to only download to your device the code and resources that are required for the app to run on it. When developers submit their apps to Apple, different packages are created for each supported device, those packages are usually quite a bit smaller than the universal package, which is the one containing all code and resources for all supported devices.”

It appears that, right now, and following the global release of iOS 12, the iOS App Store is showing the end user the universal package, rather than the individual package they would be installing for their specific handset. This is not the case for all apps, though, so if you’re looking through the storefront keep an eye out, and be aware that the large file size might not actually be the case. But it’s likely that Apple will patch the issue sooner rather than later.

Like this post? Share it!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

iPhone XR IP67 Water-Resistant Rating Explained: Here’s What It Really Means

Image
Despite costing almost $250 less than the iPhone XS , the iPhone XR offers almost the same set of features and experience as its more expensive sibling. Apple does make a few compromises to reach that $749 price tag of the iPhone XR including a downgrade to IP67 certification. While the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max come with IP68 certification, the iPhone XR features an IP67 certification. That’s not bad by any means and the same as iPhone 8 and iPhone X from 2017 . But what exactly does the IP67 certification mean? Read below to find out. What IP Certification Really Means The IP certification guideline has been defined by the IEC 60529 standard which provides an Ingress Protection a.k.a IP rating to all consumer devices for their dust and water-resistance capabilities. The ‘6’ in the IP67 rating of the iPhone XR denotes its dust-resistance capabilities, while the ‘7’ denotes its water-resistance capabilities. While 6 is the highest dust-resistance rating ...
Read more

Class Action Lawsuit Against Apple Over Spectre and Meltdown Vulnerabilities Gets Dismissed

Image
The hardware vulnerabilities Spectre and Meltdown were big deals leading into 2018, but it looks like Apple will avoid major legal action in regard to a class action lawsuit filed against the company. If you’ll recall, a class action lawsuit was filed against Apple in January of 2018 , with the complaint at the time saying, “Apple knew about the Spectre and Meltdown security defects as early as June of last year, and, as such, did not inform its customer base in a meaningful timeframe. In addition to that, the complaint states that Apple cannot implement a fix for Spectre and/or Meltdown without heavily impacting the performance of those processors”. Apple, for its part, did patch the issue for both iOS devices and macOS machines out in the wild, but that did little to assuage folks affected by the issue in the first place. Which led to that lawsuit. However, AppleInsider is reporting on Friday that the litigation against Apple has been dismissed due to a “lac...
Read more

Carriers Say They Will Close Access to Customer Geo-Location Data to Third-Parties

Image
One of the pieces of the giant data puzzle that carriers are able to routinely obtain from a smartphone on its network is geo-location, but unfortunately for customers that data hasn’t been handled all that well. In a report from The Verge , two of the three wireless carriers that were specifically named in a recent in-depth report regarding the misuse of customer geo-location data have responded in a hopefully meaningful way, indicating that change is (finally) coming. As a quick recap, it was recently reported this week by Motherboard that all it took was paying $300 to a bounty hunter and supplying a phone number to track down a device, and its owner, to a specific location. That bounty hunter picked up the data, which required no hacking at all, from a third-party company called Zumigo, which was providing data access from major phone carriers by way of another company called Microbilt — which has been offering its services to several companies for quite some time. The ...
Read more