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Comment by MatthewPhillips | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with point number 2. From Apple's perspective, it's deleting temporary storage (after all, they're called Caches and tmp. You wouldn't store anything important on /tmp on your desktop, would you?)

The "correct" place to put user data on iOS 5+ is any place that syncs with iCloud. That's the crux on this issue: iOS 5 is Apple's assertion that App Store users are their customers, not the app developer's customers, and they want to handle the backup and security around their customers data.

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Ah, I see - well, chalk that up to my having very little knowledge about the iOS ecosystem. I think my larger point still stands, that Apple's arrogant assertion of ownership of everything is going to bite them; arguably this is just telling everybody where they have to store their data. With Apple.

And honestly, if /tmp were the only filesystem I were allowed to touch, then yeah, I'd try to do something with it. That's kinda screwed up.

That's not the only folder. There's the Documents folder, but the whole drama is that this folder is backed up on iCloud, which is not necessary for offline data. Not a big deal in my opinion. Apple should and probably will add an Offline folder and all of this will be over like the Antena gate

> The "correct" place to put user data on iOS 5+ is any place that syncs with iCloud.

Um? My understanding is that Apple has forbidden developers from storing in cloud-sync areas anything that is re-downloadable or temporary. Instapaper pages are almost by definition re-downloadable; and there's no need for permanence or even synchronisation with the cloud, just a need for the system not to silently delete the files.

Is my understanding of Apple's policy flawed?

> Is my understanding of Apple's policy flawed?

Yeah. They're encouraging devs to minimize the amount of data that needs to be backed up, for obvious reasons, but there's nothing forbidding Marco from storing the articles in the Documents folder instead of the cache, and indeed that's probably what he should have been doing all along.

His insistence on keeping them in tmp has caused me to lose a number of articles over the years when I've had to do a clean wipe and the original site has long since disappeared.

Browsers have used cache and tmp directories for as long as I can remember and none of them automatically delete that content for me.

Is it really so hard for me to get some type of notification from the OS saying I have very little free space and I have x amount in temporary files stored and give me the option to remove them. It could tell me that removing these files may have adverse effects on 3rd party applications I might have installed.

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