Programming

17485 readers

123 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe

Ategon

[email protected]

[Help] Why do app updates have download sizes almost as large as the apps themselves? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/programming

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

They seem to be too big for what devs claim to be a 'minor patch' and yet too small to suggest a complete reinstallation of the app. Is there some technical reason behind it? I would like to request an ELI5 for this.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

That can get really convoluted, especially when users update at different times from different past versions.

One user may be able to make the most recent changes as they have the most recent version not including the update thats being pushed right now; another user however may be 15 revisions behind and have to find and apply each of those 15 updates in the correct order to arrive at the same set of files.

It's much easier to just push the most recent set of files in their entirety to users and have them replace whatever they've got. Then you know they didn't make any mistakes applying several subsequent changes in a row.