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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-05T09:58:48+00:00

I am developing app for studying foreign languages, and I’ll need to ship 80000

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I am developing app for studying foreign languages, and I’ll need to ship 80000 little audio files in my app.

To reduce the size of my app I decided to ship only part of them in the bundle, on the zip archive, and then un-archive it to documents directory. Then, when iPhone will be in Wi-Fi network, I’ll little by little download all the others.

But the problem is that Apple says, that we are not allowed to store big files in the Documents Directory. Flagging files for not backing up works only since 5.0.1

So I see two ways for me:

  1. Ship all the files without zipping them and storing them in the app bundle – but that’s too huge.
  2. Ship a zip, un-archive it to the cache directory and then check, if they are (not deleted by system), and download one, if it’s removed.

What should I choose or is there any other way for me to work it out?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There isn’t much point in zipping files in the app bundle if you will just decompress them to the documents directory. When app bundles are delivered to iOS devices from the app store they are zipped up anyway (.ipa file), so unzipping to documents will make your app actually take up much more space on the user’s device (once in the app bundle and once in the documents directory).

    Automated way:
    If you want to download them without using too much documents space you can write a predictive cache which has a maximum allowed size. You can keep track of when each file was last accessed and when you need to download a new file remove the oldest-accessed files until you have enough space. Your app can predict which files are needed next based on progression through the lessons, but even if they access a not-present file you can download it just-in-time and add it to the cache for future re-use.

    Manual way:
    You could provide a user interface to show the user how much space the different lessons are using and split it into lesson packs. Allow the user to control which packs remain cached and show how much space they use. They can decide when to download new packs as they progress through the lessons and when to remove old ones (if they want to save space). If the user wants to keep the files locally then you should let them, even though it uses lots of documents space.

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