“Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper, has written a blog post about an emerging problem caused by a change in the way iOS 5 does housekeeping: it now periodically clears out the ‘Caches’ and ‘tmp’ directories that some ‘offline reading’ and map apps use for storing content, meaning apps will need to re-downloaded the content that has been removed — potentially costing users in 3G data, or inconvenience when they are offline,” MacNN reports.
“The reasoning behind the change in iOS 5 is sound; the cleaning isn’t triggered until an iOS device begins to run too low on space (the exact definition of that known only to Apple) and thus removes what it considers are (or should be) temporary items to reclaim space in those situations,” MacNN reports. “Content that was ‘cleaned’ but is needed again can simply be re-downloaded. Cleaning out temporary files can also be considered a security improvement.”
MacNN reports, “Although he does not specify it, Arment and other developers have undoubtedly been in conversation with Apple about the changes in iOS 5 since before its public release (it went through an extensive beta period). A solution may be forthcoming, but Arment complains that in the meantime, users are going to be upset with apps and developers rather than Apple, even though the issue was created by a system change.”
Read more in the full article here.