I’m always amazed at just how quickly app updates mount up (ok so I have 291 apps on my iPhone so that doesn’t help). Even taking that into account there are some that are updated very regularly (Facebook seems to be a serial offender) and the cost in data to keep up to date must be considerable.
Now Jon Darke has taken a closer look and calculated that cost:
Let us assume LinkedIn is installed on 100 million devices (it states 50-100m on Android App Store alone), it updates every week with an average app update size of 261MB. Over the course of a year each user would download 13.5GB of updates for this one app alone, and across the 100 million users would equate to 162PB (Petabytes = 1,000 terabytes) of bandwidth for the planet to have an up to date professional networking mobile application.
Read the full article over at the Every Interaction blog.