Apple raises over-the-air App Store download limit to 100MB

You probably didn’t notice it while first becoming acquainted with the iOS 7 redesign yesterday, but Apple quietly doubled the limit for over-the-air downloads from the App Store. Now you can download apps up to 100MB via your cellular connection. Any apps that are larger will require you to be connected to Wi-Fi.

This is likely to make way for bigger, more advanced apps designed to take advantage of the new 64-bit processing abilities of the iPhone 5s. Still, 100MB can only get you so far. A graphics-driven game like Infinity Blade III weighs in at a whopping 1.47GB, or roughly 15 times higher than the newly raised over-the-air limit.

But limits like these aren’t such a bad thing. Many people are connected to Wi-Fi throughout the day, and when they aren’t, it’s not like you’d want to use up three-quarters of a 2GB monthly plan downloading a game via your cellular connection.

This change will really only matter for the smaller apps that are being tweaked above the 50MB mark for iOS 7, but not quite large enough to chew through your monthly data plan via the occasional cellular download. And chances are you won’t even notice this change. You’ll only receive a notification when attempting to download an app larger than 100MB over the air.

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