With the new iPad being released with the Retina display, many apps are being updated with new graphics and images to enable native resolution images to be displayed.
However, with increasing resolutions comes the resultant increase in image file sizes. Your definition of what constitutes double resolution or not may vary, but when it comes to pixel count and associated image size we are looking basically at an approximate 4x increase for any bitmap style image resource.
Take the following snippet of information as a basis for my question:
App (Pre-Retina) Post Retina
- Pages (95Mb) 269Mb
- Numbers (109Mb) 283Mb
- iMovie (70Mb) 404Mb
I would like to know if there is a resource anywhere on the internet that tracks App versions so that I can check which apps have been updated to Retina graphics (and/or are likely to be in the future based on either previous update history or developer statements), and includes such metadata as download size, so that I can work out whether my previous rule of thumb ("unless you store music photos or video on your iPad, 16Gb is all you need for apps") still holds true, or if 32Gb should now be considered the minimum for all but very light usage.
I currently have 2Gb free on a 16Gb Gen 1 iPad running a mix of apps and games, but with minimal data storage requirements (no media, basically), so it's likely I would not be able to upgrade to an 16Gb iPad Gen 3 on the assumption that all the apps got the Retina treatment.
Any other information on the sorts of Apps that are more affected by the size increase would be useful. Games seems an obvious problem area, but then if it's an OpenGL game running 3D Rendering, will the hit be quite the same as a 2D platformer running bitmapped graphics?
Best Answer
wwww.apptrackr.org isn't bad for checking app versions and their sizes. Although it obviously doesn't have all the apps with their versions (it has just the pirated ones!!), I think it can be helpful in your case.