macOS 15 No Longer Needs Twice the Free Space for App Store Installs

[MilaM]

It's not just the app store however, it's also installers you download from the web, because you need to store the installer package itself on your disk, then when it's extracted, you need additional space to store the app.

That makes sense. Haven't thought about it this way. Of course with a dmg or pkg, you can download it and unpack it on an external drive when you have little space left on the internal SSD. That's not possible when you upgrade an app using the Apple App Store.

 

[bradman83]

How is this supposed to actually work? I still have to download a dmg and then copy the app to applications which makes the free space I need 2 times the size of the app. Or did they actually use 3 times the size of the app and now it's just 2 times???

This is for downloading via the Mac App Store, not downloading .dmg files directly from the developer and installing yourself. The App Store likely moves installation assets to their destination instead of copying and deleting.

 

[Sophisticatednut]

I currently use XCodes (https://www.xcodes.app/) for very easy (and quick) management of XCode.

Color me shocked when a third party developer implements Xcode better than Apple does themselves…

 

[turbineseaplane]

"So base storage can go back down to 128gb now?"

-Tim

 

[Apple_Robert]

If I read the article correctly, nothing has really changed for the end user. The only thing that changed was Apple’s install algorithm.

 

[kcslc]

That notorious 256GB starting size of Apple is going to be bashed hard in this thread

Deservedly so.

 

[PsykX]

Xcode is only 3.46 GB these days, so it's not really an issue anymore.

It is. As soon as you start developing for anything else than macOS, it becomes 20-30GB, with all the simulators and cache.

I had a 256 GB M1 iMac with 8 GB of RAM, and I'll tell you what, I thought RAM would be my bottleneck, but no. It was the storage. It was just unusable. (Disclaimer : Coding was more of a hobby back then, now I became more serious)

 

[WWPD]

Storage space and RAM increases are kryptonite to Apple.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Storage space and RAM increases are kryptonite to Apple.

Of course!
Makes sense given how much they absolutely screw people on the upgrade pricing

 

[galad]

It is. As soon as you start developing for anything else than macOS, it becomes 20-30GB, with all the simulators and cache.

I had a 256 GB M1 iMac with 8 GB of RAM, and I'll tell you what, I thought RAM would be my bottleneck, but no. It was the storage. It was just unusable. (Disclaimer : Coding was more of a hobby back then, now I became more serious)

Right, but those aren't unrelated to the App Store, which is the topic of this thread.

 

[Hajj.david]

Xcode is only 3.46 GB these days, so it's not really an issue anymore.

That is a bold faced lie, its like 10 gb and as soon as you open and use it it will quickly take up 50-100 gb for caching etc.

 

[galad]

That is a bold faced lie, its like 10 gb and as soon as you open and use it it will quickly take up 50-100 gb for caching etc.

It needs to download 3.6 GB from the App Store, then the installed version on disk takes 12.5 GB (but it's compressed, so it takes only 6.42 GB of disk space). A few years ago it had to download 12 GB from the App Store, and the base install took much more on disk. And because everything was shipped thru the App Store, it took a long time to update.

We are talking about App Store downloads here…

 

[dandeco]

Yet after a Mac OS upgrade, in many cases I gain some free space after the install finishes, even more than before I downloaded the installer!

 

[PsykX]

Right, but those aren't unrelated to the App Store, which is the topic of this thread.

It's not off-topic.
The original message said the change mentioned in the article would fix the issues which Xcode, which I replied it won't really fix them.

 

[coredev]

Apparently now you don't.

My guess is that they now have something like a base bundle with the main executable, and additional data packages with resource files that can be downloaded at a later point, reducing the amount of required storage while installing.
Another way to achieve the same would be to stream the install data and cache in memory, but that's difficult to do.

 

[Nothing Phone(2)]

I never knew that, got about 150 apps installed on my 1TB MBP, about ten(excluding those pre-installed) comes from mac's app store lmao

 

[mansplains]

Now this would make a bigger difference if the Mac AppStore had more than a dozen apps

 

[maxoakland]

I didn’t know that was an issue. This is a great improvement

 

[Apple Fan 2008]

Thank goodness, it was nearly impossible for me to install Resident Evil with the old system.

 

[Realityck]

Starting with macOS Sequoia, app downloads and installations from the Mac App Store will no longer require double the amount of local storage space available. Instead, the free space requirement now matches the final install size of the app, plus a small buffer, according to Apple.

A long forgotten negative, finally fixed. About time.

 

[!!!]

Xcode is only 3.46 GB these days, so it's not really an issue anymore.

It's still about 10GB unpacked, though. Even with AFSC it's still closer to 10GB than 3.

 

[johnediii]

Now they need to do this with MacOS updates so a 3GB update doesn't need 45GB of free space.

 

[CarAnalogy]

Lol allow us to install app store games on external drives. 256gb for games?

If Apple is going to go to the extreme of integrating everything and charging for the nose for upgrades (which they are currently doing,) then they really need to get external devices up to near first-class citizen status.

Stuck with base storage, GPU, and RAM. In that order of importance and difficulty, they really should work on it. But they seem too distracted by AI and cars and regulatory hoops and everything else too work on core features anymore.

 

[CarAnalogy]

How is this supposed to actually work? I still have to download a dmg and then copy the app to applications which makes the free space I need 2 times the size of the app. Or did they actually use 3 times the size of the app and now it's just 2 times???

Also, free disk space is a joke on macOS these days because most "free" disk space is used for snapshots or whatnot.

I suppose technically that DMG does not have to be on the same volume.

I would make an educated guess that this works using APFS features to make the minimum number of actual writes necessary.

And it's those same (sparsely documented) APFS features that make determining actual free space a trick question.

 

[CarAnalogy]

Xcode is only 3.46 GB these days, so it's not really an issue anymore.

The other issue with Xcode is that it's tens of thousands of tiny individual files that all need to be updated. No computer handles that well.

This might help with that as well by minimizing writes.