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Wired reported today that the new iOS9 software will only be 1.3BG in size. A great deal smaller than the 4.6GB of iOS8.

My question is quite simple - how is this possible? Was there a great deal of redundant code in iOS8?

Source - http://www.wired.com/2015/06/ios-9-new-features/?mbid=social_fb

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  • Perhaps because Swift is less heavy than Objective-c, perhaps some features had been deleted... There are a lot of possibilities.
    – StrawHara
    Commented Sep 16, 2015 at 13:28
  • I'm not putting this as an actual answer because I'm not 100% sure how this part works but I did read somewhere that if the phone is low on storage, it would prompt the user to delete a selection of apps to install the update, then automatically reinstall them upon completion. A quick google would probably yield some results to back this up as it was flagged early on in the developer beta even.
    – SteppingHat
    Commented Sep 16, 2015 at 13:44

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The space needed to download the first part of the installer was optimized. It's possible to engineer for any number of trade offs - in this case, work was done to reduce the footprint of the download.

I haven't reverse engineered the installer, but my hunch is that iOS 8 added new features to allow better cleaning and update hooks so this is more a feature of iOS 8 which runs the new installer than 9 being so much smaller. I'm sure 9 is somewhat smaller, but this is a big jump as you have noticed.

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  • So if my friend is still on iOS 7 because of 8's space requirement, will the iOS 9 installation still be iOS 8-sized?
    – user24601
    Commented Sep 16, 2015 at 14:08
  • iOS 9 only installs over 8. So they will have that to do first. @user24601
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Sep 16, 2015 at 14:14

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