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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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Programming
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Because you're literally re-downloading the entire app, tossing the old version, and installing the new.
It's not modifying existing files with the changes, it's just replacing the package completely (while keeping config/user files).
Those user files/configs make up the missing data between new+old.
Lol I thought at first devs calculated exactly what portions of the apps need updating and uploaded only that much portion in the app stores. I dunno what to make of this discovery now.
That can get really convoluted, especially when users update at different times from different past versions.
One user may be able to make the most recent changes as they have the most recent version not including the update thats being pushed right now; another user however may be 15 revisions behind and have to find and apply each of those 15 updates in the correct order to arrive at the same set of files.
It's much easier to just push the most recent set of files in their entirety to users and have them replace whatever they've got. Then you know they didn't make any mistakes applying several subsequent changes in a row.
That's fairly easy to do for interpreted languages, but it's a lot more problematic for compiled apps that are distributed as a machine code binary.
I think windows update does that, or at least used to do. That's why it is so slow to update, because you need every update in succession, you can't just grab the latest one.