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Comment by statictype | Hacker News Reader

Some of the app review guidelines seem weird:

Apps larger than 20MB in size will not download over cellular networks (this is automatically prohibited by the App Store)

Don't many games cross this threshold?

Apps that browse the web must use the iOS WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript

Opera Mini - which was accepted by the App Store - would seem to fail this rule.

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> Don't many games cross this threshold?

Yep, and they don't download over cellular networks - you have to do it over wi-fi.

> Opera Mini - which was accepted by the App Store - would seem to fail this rule.

It seems to get round it on a slight technicality. It goes via the Opera proxy server and isn't actually reading HTML (the stream is compressed and encoded) so you could argue that it's not strictly a web browser. In a sense it's closer to something like Instapaper - it takes a chunk of the web, encodes it and passes it to the app to use.

The 20MB size limit over cell networks has been published for a long time. It used to be 10MB and they raised it last year, so nothing new on that one.

Also, the 20MB limit applies to everything in iTunes, not just the app store. If you purchase a video in iTunes that is larger than 20MB, it will refuse to download it on cellular connections.

Doesn't that also rule out the majority of podcasts? 8/12 on my phone right now are over 20MB. Seems like a rather harsh restriction.

It rules out downloading any type of app or media from iTunes that is greater than 20 Megabytes over the cellular connection.

Presumably this is in place to try to keep AT&T from falling even more over under the load.

They've always done this since the App Store was first launched - in fact, the cap was initially 10MB, not 20MB. And as someone with a metered data plan, I'm glad that I can't accidentally use a huge chunk of my bandwidth downloading a super large game or app, but I'd also prefer a way to override this restriction if I'm OK with downloading a 25MB app or podcast over the cell network.

Yeah, especially when you're on a metered data plan. If I'm stuck paying for x GB, I damn well want to use my quota any way I like.

A lot of games put a lot of work into reducing their size below the 20MB threshold. The big games out there are probably over 20MB, but a lot of games are able to get below 20MB as long as they use compressed resources.

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