Can someone explain to my why it takes SO GODDAMNED LONG to update applications on iPhone via iTunes? Tonight I updated 5 apps and it took over an hour. I’m watching this progress bar just absolutely CRAWL and I’m wondering how on earth it could possibly require this much time.
Applications aren’t that large—aside from Texas Hold’em, which has lots of video content and weighs in at 128MB, most applications I’ve got are less an 2MB in size—and they’re sandboxed, so what on earth is the iPhone OS doing during an install that takes this long?
Let’s assume it takes, for some unknown reason, 10x longer to copy an application to the iPhone than any other content over USB 2.0. Fine. So even in the case of the 128MB application, that’s, what, a maximum of one minute. So what on earth is happening for the other 10-15 minutes it takes for iTunes to “update” the app?
From what I can tell from the junk iTunes keeps in Finder for applications, iTunes makes a copy of the current application package, gives it an incremental number, then copies the new one in its place (and, obviously, brings forward preferences and data). Then it updates the spring board to include the application again, which moves it back to the first screen and updates the title/icon if necessary.
So am I to believe that in an average case it takes the iPhone 10 minutes to duplicate a 2MB file, copy preferences and data and update the spring board? Something crazy is going on here.