So as we all know it’s pretty much impossible to get an application under 10 megabytes with Unity iPhone (even with the extra stripping power of the advanced version)
I didn’t think this was an issue until i recently observed a friends free application that had a huge uptick in downloads when they made it less than 10 Megs.
For well known apps i don’t think the 10 Meg download limit is an issue, but for small indie developers i think it is. Many people will try to download one time and if they can’t they will move on. I think it’s especially true with free apps or lite versions where people are just trying things out.
But when you download a “large” app like this, it’s queued, isn’t it? So even if they move on and download something smaller because they aren’t on Wifi, the download is still counted, isn’t? Unless they never connect to Wifi…
i don’t think it is queued. User just gets a message saying you need to be on a WiFi connection. So with Unity it’s impossible to create any application that can be dowloaded over the 3G network.
its possible to create such apps but you must own iPhone Advanced and have a game thats opted and targeted at it (mesh compression, texture compression, reduced texture sizes)
you can’t expect to get the quality of a 50-100mb game and get it into 10mb
as you will realize when you check out those games they are either shallow or visually very restricted (pure 2d games ported from other mobile platforms) or just project specific highly optimized.
In either case its clear that its already a wonder that such a feature rich and highly flexible 3d tech like unity can fit in the sub 10mb area at all. this “can do everything and works even for bloody beginners” has its drawbacks and one of them is the size which comes from .NET and the unity engine itself.
Yeah, and i think the best thing to do is that we as developers all write emails to apple developer feedback asking to raise the arbitrary nonsense limit of 10 mb to at least 15 or 20.
Do it.
Now
I’d vote for raising the limit to 20MB just to end the debate about how much the 10MB limit affects sales if nothing else. Ideally there shouldn’t even be a limit in the first place, but I know that’s asking too much; I’m sure it’s all AT&T’s fault somehow…
Please all go to Sign In - Apple or some other support contact place on apple side and submit a request like this if you see it fitting:
Please raise the cap at which apps can be downloaded when not on wifi. The current 10 mb app filesize limit is way too low. It makes many not download content on the go they´d like to get and is negative for both app developers and app buying consumers.
That´s what i´ll do now, hope when enough people do it they will listen =)
Also now that the iPhone will not be bound to a single provider in more and more of the big markets, apple should have more of a say regarding such things so i think its the ideal time to ask for it while they are probably arranging deals with the new providers in Germany, America etc.
It near granted is as AT&T has the nonsense 3G filesize limit.
Mine doesn’t have it here in switzerland and I doubt many others have it as others don’t sell balloonware (many dataplans here are not flatrates but 1GB free and pretty hefty costs about that border) and thus don’t have to fear people using it as broadband replacement.
As iPhone Advanced user, we at least have ways to tackle it efficientely: Asset Bundles
Offer the base application with base levels directly and the rest as extra download, free (like Tower Madness) or payed as EA and others that have gone that far to sell “Shells” at premium prices and the content at another fortune
Hello,
This is not entirely true. There are few Unity iPhone applications in App store that are under 10 megs, but of course at the price of the content richness. We are integrating new Mono runtime (2.6) into Unity iPhone and it will allow to decrease final build size more.
We’ve had a variety of products (we’ve had a fairly large lineup over the last year) and we’ve never actually been able to prove that being under 10mb made any difference.
But as mentioned, to do so you would need to strip out a lot of features.
Oddly, our Unity apps aren’t that big (around 40 to 90mb), we have other titles built without Unity that are going to be lucky to be <150mb…
My company was pretty concerned that our super stripped down game wasn’t under 10mb, so we worked pretty hard to get the game as small as possible.
When we shipped to Apple, our game was slightly over the limit. But much to our surprise, when it showed up in the AppStore, we barely slipped in at 9.3mb.
My team confirmed that they can in fact download the app over the 3G network right off the iPhone.
I agree with JT though, in that our sales have certainly not been “enhanced” by being under 10mb. If we could get the game up in the Top 100, then it might make a difference. We plan on releasing a Free version with ads in the next week or so, and then I think we’ll see how much that 10mb limit matters.
My recent iPhone experience was similar (ducking under 10 MB seemed to have no impact on downloads), but there were so many other variables at play that it’s hard to say whether the change in size really did have an effect but was offset by other things.
I was only freelancing as a composer sound designer on the project (I contributed very little coding, and the iTunesConnect account was not mine so all this is secondhand info), but that said… the developer feels very strongly that the larger size impacted his ratings, and as awful as the rating star system is in iTunes, it does seem to have some impact on sales for casual gamers (who seem to look only at the stars, not the actual written reviews).
I would think that startup time and the like would have a larger impact on this, but he feels that download size was a factor, since some people apparently gave up, and then got prompted to review at that moment, resulting in one-stars.
Just another anecdote for the debate. The iTunes store is a mess, it’s a shame there’s not a better way to discover, promote, and share apps and games.
Ideally there shouldn’t even be a limit in the first place, but I know that’s asking too much; I’m sure it’s all AT&T’s fault somehow…