Programming

17333 readers

301 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

[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/[email protected]

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] 5 points 1 year ago

The reason they’re smaller is that they’re compressed, and expanded during the install process.

For most platforms, the product update is vetted and signed as a functional program, then compressed to save space in transmission, then decompressed and validated prior to swapping with the original.

OS updates and DLCs are available to add new data to an existing system, but this isn’t generally used for discrete parts of a functional program due to the potential for abuse or errors.