Apple is priding itself in making its devices slimmer and more powerful but data from research firm ABI Research shows that iOS apps are increasing in size. The average application size over all categories was 23MB in September, which is a good 16% larger than what it was in March. The most popular application category is gaming and most games come in now at 60MB, which is a 42% increase over the past six months.
According to ABI, the inclusion of the retina display on the new iPad and Apple easing out on submissions to the App Store increased the size limit from 20MB to 50MB. ABI said that games can now be more complex and feature better graphics and can still benefit from instant cellular downloads. Android apps too saw an increase in the application size as the average size came to 6MB in September, which is a 10% jump from March. However, Android games’ size became four times to 40MB after Google allowed games up to 4GB in size to be submitted to the Play Store.
The Android platform imposed several restrictions on game developers and even customers but all that appears to be changing. The increased size limit along with greater support for superior graphics is making the Android platform a viable gaming platform for more developers to venture into. Given the high power of recent Android smartphones and tablets, gaming could also see a paradigm shift from PCs towards mobile devices. With the interfacing capability for controllers also increasing, playing on a tablet will be the same as playing on a laptop or any other console. However, the growing quality of games has a downside to it. While app sizes are increasing, the storage spaces on devices are not keeping pace. Most of the phones and tablets still come with 16GB of storage, something that will no longer be sufficient for the best games in the market and device owners will have to choose which apps to keep and which games to remove.
Experts believe that with the sizes increasing and hardware not keeping up, the gateway has been opened towards mobile cloud storage. This situation will lead to a lot of users using cloud storage for their data and apps to manage space better on their devices.
