> Stop it Apple! Every minute we spend dealing with this nonsense is a minute of lost productivity and a minute of aggravation. Collectively we've clocked up billions of these minutes and we hate it! You understand, Apple? We HATE it!
Do you remember that Leave Britney Alone kid?
Speaking as a developer, the ability to do interesting things with files has improved dramatically over the years. You can do the email attachment thing, iTunes sync, clipboard, Dropbox... In my day, we put things on S3 and passed custom links around. And we liked it! (Not really; it was terrible.)
As a user, now, I call bullshit. It's occasionally weird but it's definitely not a rage-inducing condition. Besides that, Apple has found an easy-to-communicate means of enabling their users manage the limitations of their storage:
Every app has its own weight. Need room? Dump an app. Don't worry – nothing you do in any other app will be affected.
Does it make for some duped data? Probably. Maybe tons for certain workflows. Doesn't matter.
The hermitcally sealed environments of each app let a larger swath of their userbase manage things without outside help. Limited complexity makes it easy to understand the scope of possible problems and solutions.
> Every app has its own weight. Need room? Dump an app. Don't worry – nothing you do in any other app will be affected.
To put it another way: apps need to communicate large blobs of information (i.e., documents). You'd say, from first principles, that they need a nonvolatile Inter-Process Communication mechanism.
In most OSes, apps pass documents between them with the moral equivalent of "shared memory" IPC: files that both apps have read/write access to.
In iOS, on the other hand, apps use the moral equivalent of message-passing-with-copy.
Thus, apps get all the same benefits from this that, say, Erlang processes get from in-memory message-passing-with-copy IPC. The primary one being that when the process/app is removed from the system, all its resources can be released, without having to disentangle them from any other process/app that might be depending on them. This gives you the dual philosophies of "let it crash" and "just delete it", respectively.
Do you remember that Leave Britney Alone kid?
Speaking as a developer, the ability to do interesting things with files has improved dramatically over the years. You can do the email attachment thing, iTunes sync, clipboard, Dropbox... In my day, we put things on S3 and passed custom links around. And we liked it! (Not really; it was terrible.)
As a user, now, I call bullshit. It's occasionally weird but it's definitely not a rage-inducing condition. Besides that, Apple has found an easy-to-communicate means of enabling their users manage the limitations of their storage:
Every app has its own weight. Need room? Dump an app. Don't worry – nothing you do in any other app will be affected.
Does it make for some duped data? Probably. Maybe tons for certain workflows. Doesn't matter.
The hermitcally sealed environments of each app let a larger swath of their userbase manage things without outside help. Limited complexity makes it easy to understand the scope of possible problems and solutions.
tl;dr: Ain't no Santa Claus and keep on crying.