Faster bundle installation

[michaeleisel]

I have a number of cases where I want to improve bundle installation speed and can't really leverage --app_deltas. E.g., because the two versions of the same app have few files in common (especially the binary), or because I don't want to risk cache invalidation. I'm wondering if there's any known way of speeding installation up. For example, I wonder if there's a way of sending a compressed bundle to the phone that it will uncompress itself, in the same way that it uncompresses downloads from the App Store. Are there any ideas for how to speed up bundle installation? And if there are, and they aren't in ios-deploy yet, I'd be happy to add them myself.

[gabebear]

We are mostly at Apple’s mercy here since we are just using Apple’s APIs to install and don’t have a lot we can change. If you can find a faster way to install your binary in Xcode that would be something we could investigate(to match Xcode’s speed).

[michaeleisel]

I see, so Xcode is known to be faster? Is Xcode using APIs that simply haven't been reverse engineered and used yet, or is there some special entitlement/privilege that allows Xcode special APIs we couldn't use?

[gabebear]

I believe ios-deploy and Xcode are essentially identical in speed right now. If Xcode does do something substantially faster that would be something to investigate.

[ivanhernandez13]

ios-deploy is using the same API as Xcode for installation (AMDeviceSecureInstallApplicationBundle) as of last time we checked (~a year ago?). From sampling a dummy app installation with Xcode 13.2.1 just now, it looks like Xcode is still using the same thing.

[michaeleisel]

I'm seeing a ~1 minute install time for an app using Xcode, and a ~3 minute install time using ios-deploy

[michaeleisel]

ideviceinstaller is also much faster for me

[gabebear]

@michaeleisel Can you share a test-case with us so we can reproduce the issue?

• IPA size
• command-line arguments
• Anything that would help us reproduce the issue

[michaeleisel]

Bundle size is 150mb, command-line args are simple, ideviceinstaller -i MyApp.app vs. ios-deploy --bundle MyApp.app

[DanboDuan]

ideviceinstaller usecom.apple.afc service to transfer application bundle. there is also someone using com.apple.streaming_zip_conduit service to transfer application bundle like go-ios. Both ios-deploy and Xcode use com.apple.streaming_zip_conduit too