I’m happy to say that I received an email from Apple tech support today, letting us know they reworked the “cleaning” behavior in iOS5 that hurt the type of apps we develop. This addresses the problems that I had blogged about and the developer of Instapaper blogged about prior.
Here is a snippet from the email:
“I’m happy to tell you that I have some new information that should resolve your issue. Included in the newly released beta of iOS 5.0.1 is support for a new extended attribute that will allow you to exclude files from all backups on a per file basis.”
As a stop-gap, we had moved our map caching to the directory that gets backed up to iCloud and included a view to tell people how to disable backups. This was the only way to get around maps being randomly deleted. Now, we can use this new method to save your maps locally without having to back up all the gigs of data to the cloud.
We’ll be implementing this change as soon as the new iOS release goes out of beta. Hat tip to Apple for listening on this one.
