In late September, Apple announced that app slicing, an App Thinning feature of iOS 9, was unavailable to developers because of an iCloud backup issue. Apple today updated developers on the status of app slicing, noting that it's once again available for use following the iOS 9.0.2 update and the recent Xcode 7.0.1 update.
The issue affecting app slicing has been fixed, and device-specific versions of apps will be delivered when downloaded by users running iOS 9.0.2 or later.
App slicing is one facet of App Thinning, an iOS 9 feature designed to decrease the size of iOS apps to save valuable space on devices without a lot of storage space. With app slicing, users only download the app assets created for their particular device rather than a full set of assets for multiple devices. For example, on an iPhone 6s, a user will only need to download iPhone 6s specific files, ignoring both larger iPad artwork and lower quality resources for earlier iOS devices.
To take advantage of the space saving features in app slicing, all iOS 9 users should upgrade to iOS 9.0.2. App slicing is not available in earlier versions of iOS 9 or in iOS 8.
Top Rated Comments
On top of that many developers don't seem to care to clean up their distribution packages, leaving an awful lot of unused clutter and rubbish for us to fill our devices. Once the 100Mb over-air limit cannot be reached anymore, many developers seem to get lazy.
I may be getting old but I remember the days when apps used to be in the lower MBs - now most apps I use see it as an achievement if they are able to keep it around 100MB.
Those of us who pay for Google Drive and (yes) Apple iCloud storage - would love to be able to utilize some of that storage for app data, apps, and other "storage" items that don't need to be on demand.
Thought it was pretty sweet back in the old days of Android when I could install apps (when I was rooted) to the 32GB SD card. That didn't last too long.