Hello,
We're evaluating Apple-hosted Background Assets for an app distributed on the public App Store.
Is there any documentation or guidance on update latency, specifically:
- How quickly are asset updates propagated to devices once a new version is published? More specifically, is propagation near-immediate, or should we expect a delay (minutes/hours/days) before devices know they have to pick up the new version in the ideal condition of being connected to Wi-Fi, locked, charging and the app has been recently used?
- Are there any other factors other than the aforementioned ones that affect how fast an update reaches a device?
Any official documentation, WWDC session, or guidance from the team would be appreciated, thanks in advance.
Hi, @Artemisia! Updates to Apple-Hosted Background Assets are typically processed within minutes, after which they’re available for internal testing with TestFlight. Submissions to App Review are typically approved or rejected in under 24 hours, though they can be much faster. Once an update is approved, it can take 24 hours to propagate across all of the global App Store servers. People’s devices automatically poll for asset-pack updates in the background. How frequently a particular device polls for updates to a particular app’s asset packs depends on a variety of factors, including the charging state, Wi-Fi network connectivity, and how frequently a person uses the app. When your app is in the foreground, you can call AssetPackManager.checkForUpdates() to force the system to download the latest available versions of your app’s asset packs that are currently available locally on the device.
