[Solved] Appflow Updates are large when releasing updated builds

Hey all

So I have a project for a client that is an internal business app. This app is not being uploaded to the Play store so all updates are to be released using Appflow (Large version updates we will do manually when the time comes).

The trouble that I am having is that when I release updates, rather than downloading the changed files it seems to be re-downloading the whole app. 700+ files in total. A colleague of mine is also using Appflow in a project that he is working on and is able to only download the updates files. From our testing, it was only the 1 file that was changed. We have tried to figure out what the problem is on my project, but to no avail.

The best that I have been able to do is reduce the downloaded files from the original 800+ to 700+ based on information from the following forum post: Ionic pro live deploy: slow launching time except when initial launch from playstore/appstore.

I have consulted stack overflow and the Ionic forums with little success and tried opening a support ticket with Ionic, but the companies paid tier is not high enough :slightly_frowning_face: .

Has anybody encountered this before and how did they fix it?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks to some help from the Ionic support team I was able to resolve this issue.

“It turns out that the manifests created to track the file changes can get out of alignment if you build for native locally instead of in Appflow.”

What this means is that to get the full benefits of Appflow, you need to do package builds through Appflow whenever you want to do a release build of your app. This then prevents said miss-alignment and results in the downloaded files for an update to only be the changed files. In my testing, it was 2 files that were downloaded and not the 700+ that I had previously.

I would not have been able to solve this if it were not for the awesome Ionic team and the slack channel (https://ionic-worldwide.slack.com).

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Hi @EuanDScott, Could you explain for me? I am not sure about your solution.

Hi there.

It has been sometime since I solved this and I have changed jobs since then so I don’t have access to the original email, but from what I do remember:

When using AppFlow to update your app, if you do a build of you machine locally and then update it via App Flow it re-downloads the whole app, not just the updated files. However if you do the build via App Flow and then distribute it via the stores (or in my case directly onto the client devices) the updates are only the files that you have changed.

If you have an App Flow account you can get official support from the team: https://ionicframework.com/support

Best of luck.

Just for reference anyone coming to this same issue… check this link, the manifest file can be created in your local native to prevent the app from downloading the entire app files…

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