iOS 9 will dramatically reduce the space occupied by applications installed in iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches thanks to a new system designed by the company A for developers. This system is based on three main components, each of them working together to allow users to enjoy much more of the space that their terminals have available at the time of purchase from Apple.
App Thinning is the name of the system designed by the Apple company, based on both the new SDK specially created for app developers and iOS 9, and below we will talk about its main components.
App Slicing. Through App Slicing, the Apple company allows developers to share the elements of their applications on iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch types, so that when users download the application, they download only the content necessary for their terminal.
A universal application has elements for multiple iPhone or iPad models, but only some of them are needed on your terminal, so through App Slicing when you download the application, only the elements that are necessary for running on your terminal will be downloaded.
This method can reduce the space occupied by applications by up to a third, and if we think of complex games, the space occupied by them can be reduced to a few hundred MB from a few GB.
Say you have an iPhone 5C, which uses a 32-bit CPU and a GPU that doesn't support the Metal API. Download a modern universal game, and that binary includes 64-bit code, iPad and "3x" iPhone 6 Plus assets, and Metal API code that it doesn't need. It only needs the 32-bit code, "2x" iPhone-sized assets, and the OpenGL graphics code.
App Slicing should theoretically be done by the developers who will have to apply tags to the application elements to differentiate them from those required for certain models of iDevices, but Apple is able to do this alone.
On-Demand Resources (ODR). This function is intended to reduce the size of the applications by downloading only a certain type of content needed immediately to run the title, leaving other content for later download, as needed.
More precisely, let's say that you install a game in which there are multiple levels that must be completed. When downloading from the App Store, you will only have the application with its necessary elements for your terminal, but also the first levels, following that the following ones will be downloaded later as you advance in the game, the old ones being deleted simultaneously with the download of the new ones.
Bitcode. Finally we arrive at Bitcode, this function obliging application developers to upload only a preliminary, uncompiled form of the application to the App Store, Apple compiling it before we download it, optimizing it at the same time.
Optimization also involves differentiating resources for each type of device, but also streamlining the way the code is run to make it more efficient and provide a better user experience.
Although there will be problems for those who don't spend a lot of time on the Internet while playing, we are talking about entire GB of space saved by Apple's App Thinning system.
