Over-the-air updates are a go in iOS 5 and its quite evident if you’ve been using the recently released iOS 5 beta software for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. But will those OTA updates be strictly limited to Wi-Fi? Probably not, according to 9to5Mac’s discovery.
Even we at The Readers Eye had a strong feeling that since iOS 5 itself is a huge piece of software therefore the only way for Apple to deliver updates would be either via iTunes or Wi-Fi. But a new discovery has led to the fact that iOS 5 will definitely support OTA updates over a 3G network, which in turns spurs up the notion that iOS 5 will have minor incremental or “small point” updates which will be smaller in size, unlike a huge 700MB plus IPSW file on its own. This all was discovered in the iOS 5 SDK, refer to the screenshot below which clearly shows that the update can be downloaded over Wi-Fi or 3G both:
Alright fine, OTA updates, awesome news. But, what about the carriers? Will they approve the update being pushed out to iPhone or iPad users who are running on a 3G network? I’m guessing that the update will definitely go through the carrier first for approval. Imagine a whole country with millions of iPhone users downloading the update at the same time, that would hammer the carrier’s 3G network to the point of death in a matter of minutes.
In case you’re wondering what point downloads are, 9to5Mac explains it in a very simple fashion:
There is a catch, though. Based on these SDK findings, it looks like only certain iOS updates will support downloads over 3G. Perhaps small point upgrades like 5.1.1 will come over 3G but 5.1 will have to come over WiFi. Or perhaps 5.1 can come over 3G but 6.0 has to be downloaded over a WiFi network.
Its quite obvious that major updates to iOS have to be downloaded over Wi-Fi since they are chunky in terms of overall size.
iOS 5 was announced back in WWDC and is a huge update over iOS 4 in a wide variety of ways. The new and improved notifications system, Twitter integration, its ability to cook food and play a game of Polo for you is a few things which it can do (the last two features were totally made up). We are expecting iOS 5 will reach its final stage in Fall after which is will be available to every iPhone, iPod touch and iPad user, sometime in September maybe if we’re not wrong, but along with iOS 5, we are also expecting the release of the next gen iPhone, the iPhone 5.
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