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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

I don't use an iPhone, but my wife does. She says that it will remove apps from the device that you haven't used in a while, and then automatically re-download when you try to run them. On our WiFi at home, that's fine, but if we are out and about it can take up to an hour to download a single app.

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You can disable that (Settings → Apps → App Store → Offload Unused Apps.)

It's a nice feature, but it would be even nicer if you could pin some apps to prevent their offloading even if you haven't used them in ages.

> but it would be even nicer if you could pin some apps to prevent their offloading even if you haven't used them in ages.

That change would make _viable_ for me at all, right now it's next to useless.

Currently iOS will offload apps that provide widgets (like Widgetsmith) even when I have multiple Widgetsmith widgets on my 1st and 2nd homescreens, I just never open the app (I don't need to, the widgets are all I use). One day the widgets will just be black and clicking on them does nothing. I have to search for Widgetsmith and then make the phone re-download it. So annoying.

Also annoying is you can get push notifications from offloaded apps. Tapping on the notification does _nothing_ no alert, no re-download, just nothing. Again, you have to connect the dots and redownload it yourself.

This "feature" is very badly implemented. If they just allowed me to pin things and added some better UX (and logic for the widget issue) it would be much better.

Yeah. We have a 112 app in Finland, for making emergency calls and relaying your location. Maybe it's been made at least partially unnecessary by phone network features, but anyway. It's one app I absolutely never ever use except when someday I'll be in an emergency and will want to use it and then it'll be offloaded.

Definitely, I had this problem on an old iPad where it would often decide to unload my password manager...

Note that this should only happen when you're running low on storage. [0] But yes, it can be very annoying.

0: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/manage-storage-on-iph...

I've also noticed that the marginal cost of larger storage on an iPhone is significantly higher than on Android (e.g. my phone was $220 with 256GB of storage; it's $100 per 128GB to upgrade the iPhone 16 storage), making people much more likely to be low on storage.

Last I checked the marginal cost of storage for Google, Samsung, and Apple phones sits around $600/TB. More for lower amounts, less for higher amounts.

I don't look much into phones that don't promise a reasonable support life, but if I go look at motorola all these midrange phones don't even have size options. At least some of them accept microsd.

Some low hanging fruit for reducing app package sizes that tends to be neglected is just going through your dependencies and dropping the ones you don’t need and replacing those with unreasonable file size.

I forget which it was but years ago there was a common customer service library that a lot of apps include that on its own added like 25MB to your app package size. That’s insane, I’ve built and shipped full apps that aren’t that large. Adding that library would’ve over doubled size for questionable utility.

It doesn’t take dropping too many dependencies like that to reduce package size significantly.

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