There is literally a very long and growing list of apps available on Apple’s App Store, from the basic Facebook-s to the addicting Clash of Clans to the much more mundane Battery Saver and Flashlight, of course you could’t not install these things without free memory on your i-Device. However, have you ever wondered why the app you installed was advertised as only a 95MB download but upon checking it took away more than what was advertised? Don’t fret, that is indeed normal as installers are compressed to our convenience so we would download the whole software but with minimal size of data transferred, upon installation the software expands itself and that is what you are seeing right now.
But there comes a time in which your 16GB iPhone cannot download anymore, and that is why Apple has implemented its so called: “App Thinning”/”App Slicing” feature that coincided with the iOS 9 update. In previous iOS versions of your devices, applications were designed to be downloaded with everything in mind, imagine having an iPhone 6S Plus and you download Twitter, instead of downloading just the version for your gadget, it downloads the whole universal application, which in turn, take up more space than the usual.
Now why would Apple do such a thing? If you are one of those 32GB/64GB/128GB and above owners you are definitely in the clear, however with 16GB devices still the brand’s cheapest priced gadgets, they have to space storage as much as they can. Having owned a 16GB iPhone 5 and iPhone 4, I had a hard time deleting applications and installing iOS updates due to the fact that one of my favorite apps consume 2.3GB of my available 12.4GB, with my personal music collection already amounting to 8.37GB, thats 10.67GB already and I am forced to delete apps or pictures just to accommodate the next app or picture.
Apple’s new iOS 9, that launched last September 16th, 2015, along with the promise that the OS update would be smaller than previous versions, Apple has implemented it on your device to give you more space to download your things with.
The only and possibly the thing that turns everyone off about App Thinning is that you CANNOT transfer your applications anymore from your device to your PC using iTunes, it will not sync, if you want to update it via iTunes, then that means iTunes will download every version and every asset needed but if you update an app via your device, it will not sync back to your computer. This also means that if you download via device only, you will need to re-download the app via iTunes to have a copy as well.
To summarize, App Thinning:
- The feature forces the device to download the lowest amount of storage of the software by only downloading the resources it needs to run on that specific device
- The feature is only available to devices compatible and already upgraded to iOS 9
- Additional resources may still be downloaded but on a “download-if-needed” system
- Disables copying of apps from device to PC