I was recommended a new mapping program for my iphone yesterday, and when I went to download it, it said that I needed 4.2GB of space to install.
Also as a "haha, crappy bandwith!" aside: I found it strange to think of most people only having -700kbps in the states. I have a 100mbps line for 50USD/month and regularly get around 60mbps. I have to install chrome on various computers for work, and I've never even noticed more than a few second delay between downloading the binaries and installation.
Not all Americans can afford $50 USD / month for a luxury service. There are also wide swaths of the US that don't have any better options since telecoms refuse to build more infrastructure.
Agreed. My company's offering opened my eyes to two things:
1. Many people, even in the States, have sloooow connections at home.
2. Many people have very poor cell/GSM/GPRS coverage. We still have to provide a POTS modem for our handheld data collection devices[1].
[1] We just released a new device (smartphone) that supports a POTS modem. Think of that! A cellphone that transfers data via a dial up modem.
For an iPhone app though? Meant to be installed over the air? That's incredibly poorly thought out.
Better would be to allow you to download which maps you need as you need them, to shrink the initial installer down. Better than that would be having the maps be online accessible, and are immediately cached to the device after first use. Best is probably somewhere between those two, or something along those lines, but I can't imagine who packaged up a 4.2Gb iphone app and didn't ask any questions about that.
It's probably more robust to let iTunes download the whole binary, instead of have the user attempt to download specific maps over WiFi (the device may go to sleep, run out of battery, etc).
Funny how I tried to download iOS 4.3 from iTunes for my new iPhone 4 yesterday and the computer went to sleep while downloading it, which is around 700Mb. When I noticed I woke it up and clicked on resume, bang, went from 400Mb to "zero Kb" right away.
And, uh, it happened twice... Finally, at my third attempt I was able to download the whole thing after deactivating automatically sleep mode. As soon as it finished, an error was shown and so the file was lost again.
I was able to get great connection speeds in San Diego with Time Warner for a little less than $60 a month - if you upgrade to their turbo package just make sure that they give you a compatible router; I spent five months paying for the better service without being able to access it because they didn't upgrade the hardware.
Also as a "haha, crappy bandwith!" aside: I found it strange to think of most people only having -700kbps in the states. I have a 100mbps line for 50USD/month and regularly get around 60mbps. I have to install chrome on various computers for work, and I've never even noticed more than a few second delay between downloading the binaries and installation.