[Blaaguuu]

That seems great in theory, but many people still have really restrictive data caps on their plans, so I'm not sure we are quite ready for that model.

It would also suck if you had an app on your phone like a star/constellation map, which you only use every once in a while when you are out in the middle of nowhere... To have your phone automatically delete that app, then try to re-download it when there isn't any way to do so would be a pretty awful experience.

Works well for something like the Apple TV - I don't think it's good for phones yet.

[grandalf]

Well I'd want to be able to flag certain apps to not be expired, or to be restored next time I connect to WiFi if they were cleared for some reason.

Apps that take more than a second or two to download over LTE would be the difficult edge cases, but there are very few such apps, and even if they occupied 50% of the phone's storage and were never reaped the caching approach would be fine.

The big issue is the data cap, but things are trending toward unlimited data (I have it with T-Mobile now) and many of us are often connected to WiFi at least periodically throughout the day.

[maccard]

Most of the apps that are installed on my iOS device are ~100MB - slack (140) Snapchat (140) Spotify (100) viber(100) messenger (97) Airbnb (97) Etsy/Yelp/Starbucks/ are all roughly 70MB - Facebook is ~150 I believe. The worst part is that all of those apps are pretty much webviews...

[bdrool]

Facebook's app has a super-bloated > 100MB binary:

http://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-earth-th...

I think they have something like 150+ iOS devs, so they're almost up to a megabyte per dev!

[toxican]

This is partly why I just stick to the mobile version of the site. It's a slightly buggy sometimes (repetitious frontpage), but it works well enough and it isn't draining my battery in the background for no reason.

[maccard]

Messenger is another facebook app, which is almost 100MB on top of having facebook installed.