Android and iOS game sizes rise by 42%
Saturday, October 20, 2012 at 2:40AM The iPad 3’s Retina display and Apple’s more liberal submission policy have caused the file sizes of leading iOS apps to grow substantially, especially in games. The latest data from ABI Research shows that the global average app size across all categories was 23 megabytes in September, 16% more than in March.
For the most popular app category, games, the average size was 60 megabytes, meaning a six-month increase of 42%. Meanwhile, the size of leading Android apps for a similar sample was around six MBs in September, representing an increase of 10% against March. The games, however, nearly quadrupled to over 40 MBs in reported size, as Google also revamped its own submission policies.
For senior analyst Aapo Markkanen, the data confirms two important points. “First, Apple’s decision in March to increase the maximum size of 3G/4G-downloadable apps from 20MBs to 50MBs has clearly had an unleashing effect on developers. Their games can now be more complex and graphically polished, while still being able to benefit from the instant gratification of cellular downloads. And second, Google’s move to start hosting files of up to 4GBs on Google Play has been similarly well-received among the developer community. Android’s old way of doing things was cumbersome for game developers and their customers alike, but there is evidence that this change, along with certain other improvements, is indeed making it a more credible gaming platform.” More at ABI.
Hardly surprising, but it does put pressure on manufacturers to include more memory and for customers to go for the bigger model each time.
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Reader Comments (2)
I had to wait a fair while and pay well over the odds to ship a 32GB S3 in from Germany. By the time I'd installed everything I had 11GB of internal storage left.
Yes I could have pared it down, but I don't want to have to be continually managing space.
And I don't like having programs installed to an external microSD card. I want to share the card between my phone and my tablet, as it has my music, books and videos on.
For those of us who game 32GB is becoming the minimum. Anyone who buys a 16GB phone with no expandable storage may come to regret it.
I would agree. I currently have around 8 apps/games which are at least 500mb or more (in fact 3 or them are around 2GB) - if we want console type gaming 32GB plus SD card has to be minimum requirement going forward.