If I’m lucky, she’ll email support and I’ll at least get a chance to explain myself. My app appears to have failed and deleted her data, which makes it seem unreliable and decreases her opinion of it.It creates a terrible experience for everyone: (Last week, almost this exact scenario happened to one of my customers.) Later in the flight, with no internet connectivity, she goes to launch Instapaper and finds it completely empty. (I think highly of my customers.) This causes free space to fall below the threshold that triggers the cleaner, which - in the background, unbeknownst to her - deletes everything that was saved in Instapaper. Right before boarding, she remembers to download the newest issue of The Economist. She syncs a bunch of movies and podcasts, downloads some magazines, and buys a few new games, leaving very little free space. But that’s not the case.Ī common scenario: an Instapaper customer is stocking up an iPad for a long flight. It’s easy to assume that this isn’t a big problem - that surely, anything downloadable can be redownloaded at any time. Podcast clients (the rules don’t apply to synced podcasts from iTunes).Ebook and comic-book apps (including iBooks, if the rules apply to it). Instapaper and anything that saves web articles for offline reading.This is problematic for lots of apps, including this quick list off the top of my head: There’s no longer anywhere to store files that don’t need to be backed up (or can’t be, by the new policy) but shouldn’t be randomly deleted. This new policy now locks me into using Caches: I no longer have a choice.īut in iOS 5, there’s an important change: Caches and tmp - the only two directories that aren’t backed up - are “cleaned” out when the device is low on space.Ī handful of developers reported this problem happening to them with Instapaper before iOS 5 was even released to the public - I’m dreading the influx of reports about this now that iOS 5 is available to everyone. Instapaper has stored its downloaded articles in Caches for years, since I didn’t want to slow down iTunes syncing for my customers or enlarge their backups unnecessarily, and full restores don’t happen often enough for it to be a problem for most people. Sounds easy: just move anything that can be redownloaded to Caches. Examples of files you should put in the Caches directory include database cache files and downloadable content, such as that used by magazine, newspaper, and map applications.
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