We should have more delta updates!

I'd like to talk about iOS but not iOS 5 in general, I'm talking about the little mini features that only tech euthistics apprectiate. Delta Updates, Apple introduced an Over the air (OTA) updating system where your Idevice downloads the update and installs the update right on your iDevice. You do not need a computer for this process, just a Wi-Fi signal is required and your set, you don't have to back anything up or restore anything after you've done. It's very clever.

An average update for the idevice is around 600-700mb and that sometimes can be a bit of the pain in the bum because you've got to wait for it to download and then install it and it might take ages to download on your phone. Well with Delta updates, you don't need to download the 700mb file, you download a smaller update which is around 50-200mb, on average it's around 124mb and the reason they can shrink it down is because you're not updating the entire operating system, you are only downloading the changes between one update to the other and that's how apple can shrink a 700mb file to a 124mb.

Updating your iDevice OTA only works for incremental updates, so this means that if you wanted to update to iOS 6 from iOS 5.1, you can't do it, since you're basically getting an entirely new operating system, you can kinda understand why apple have done this. The only way to update with that big of a leap, you'll have to use your computer to do it for you But if you were updating from iOS 5.1 to iOS 5.1.1, you'd be able to do it, since it's only an incremental update.

This puts a lot less work on apple's servers and mainly the entire bandwidth of the internet. Using delta updates for the millions of people that are using an iPhone makes the internet a faster place. If apple didn't include delta updates, everybody who wants to update to their newest version will have to download 700mb of data, it will make apple servers slow and unneeded bandwidth will be used it. 

Now Google have introduced something similar and that's smart app updates. Say you were downloading an update for angry birds, you'd have to download 25 megabytes but with google's smart updates, the download size has been stripped down from 25 megabytes to 4 megabytes. This is very very smart by Google and cuts out a massive amount of internet usage across the entire world.

Thanks for reading