If you play a lot of mobile games you’ve probably experienced this. You finally get a game installed, open it up, and are greeted with a message to the effect of “downloading additional data”. Why wasn’t that data downloaded while the game was being downloaded?
In: 23
[removed]
From u/johste over at r/MobileGaming from [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/MobileGaming/comments/hjyftc/why_do_i_have_to_download_data_for_most_mobile/) post;
>Developer here. This is called the “Getting a foot in the door” tactic. There are several reasons for it.
>
>1. Apple and Google has a very low limit for how big an app can be before their marketplace will warn or block the customer from downloading it while without wifi. Since a lot of people discover games while their commuting or otherwise without wifi this lets developers install an empty shell of their app to serve as a bookmark and reminder on your homescreen. Otherwise potential customers delay downloading and might have forgotten by the time they get home.
>
>2. If the first download of the app was huge, potential customers might cancel before it was finished thinking their internet is slow / faulty. That there is something wrong with the app or realize that it might be expensive to download without wifi.
>
>3. Having everyone on the same version is important in online games. Because these apps like to update frequently and Appstore/Google Play don’t update everyone’s app immediately when a new update is available. This stops you from having to manually go to the marketplace to look for an update every time you want to play the game.
>
>4. Having the ability update their app without you going to the marketplace allows them to add more content faster and make sure everyone is on the same version.
Nope, when you dowloaded the game from store you’ve just got a downloader. I guess it’s not to scare people whith how much transfer they have to spend to actually play the game while they’re still at the store/on the stage of choosing a game to play among many others. When the game is chosen, already, at least partly, on the phone though… 😉 the likelyhood of you uninstalling it and going back to browsing the store is rather low then. All to keep a client. Some would even sweeten it up further by playing some introduction/prologue wile the real download takes place.
It’s the same reason that, if you play MMOs or other online games, the download from the website is a few MB which then downloads multiple GB of data. The purpose is twofold: first, it makes the pathway to play a lot simpler. You don’t have to spend 10 mins on the app store page (or website) downloading the game. And second, downloading the files isn’t the same as installing the content. Something like a mobile game might install a downloader up front to then give you the ability to set up permissions and network information before committing to the full install
There is limit on playstore and apple market which dictate maximum size fo applications. Everything above that size should be downloaded separately.
Optimisation part also make it place. Some game developers have different assets packs for different devices and different countries ( Chinees lows creates a lot of troubles).
1. You may be downloading the “base” game, and the extra downloads are patches. This makes distributing one installer easier.
2. Programs with ads may pre-download the ads to display to you while you are offline.
3. It makes the initial install size seem smaller “Oh look, only 50MB to download this game” followed by a 1GB required “update”.
On top of what other people said app stores generally have a hard limit of 150MB on the store. If you want to go beyond that you don’t really have a choice.
Latest Answers