What's the limit for the size of iPhone apps?

Question

I have an app which is quiet huge. It has tons of images and sounds. In total it's 30 MB in size.

1) Is there an official limit for the app size?

2) Are there other "practical" limits I should consider?

Answer 1

Reading around, there are reports that the absolute maximum size for an application is 2GB (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1605342).

Other than that, if your app is over 10MB, users will only be able to download it over a wifi connection, having the impact that users won't be able to download your application easily when they are out and about.

Answer 2

1) I believe that you shouldn't ask for maximum size, as you have to aim for minimum possible size for your apps. As iPhone has limited memory (both storage & RAM), you should not create a huge app. (I doubt an app > 200MB can pass through Apple's app check.)

Yeah, Phil is right, when you app is over 10MB, it can only be downloaded via wifi or iTunes. Quite a lot users may want to download anywhere they like using 3G networks, so >10MB is not recommended.

Also, take care those users with iPhone 2G. If you produce a >10MB app, it takes them a day to download your app (if they are lucky enough to have no disconnection at the middle of download...)

2) practical limit ... K.I.S.S = Keep It Simple and Small.

That's it. Hope it helps.

Answer 3

This might sound obvious, but there are two size limits to keep in mind here - neither are absolutely defined.

One is the limit for the application bundle. I don't know if there is a real limit (other than the device's flash storage limit), but this should rarely be an issue. Keep in mind the 10Mb threshold that the other Phil mentions though. There may be something in the 2GB limit too, I don't know.

The more important limit is on the size of the loaded binary image and it's runtime memory usage. The iPhone is obviously a constrained device in this area. The original iPhones and iPod touches had 128Mb of total RAM, with no paging. Current models have 256Mb, but it's a bit early to limit yourself to that subset of the installed base if you can help it. Assuming 128Mb, of that a fair chunk is used by the system itself and its background tasks (and people want user background tasks too!?!).

In a conversation with an Apple Engineer he said that apps should be written to use no more than about 25-30Mb! Up to 60Mb may be available but cannot be counted on (but you could use this extra for caching stuff that you can purge as necessary).