Originally Posted by
natasftw Delta means change. Basically, he said he believes the OTA updates only modify files that need to change from one version to the next while getting the IPSW pulls the entire package.
You're focusing on beta when you should simply be comparing OTA vs IPSW. If you're not surprised a beta would be ~5-6 times the size of the non-beta, I'm not sure I'd trust you as a source.
The file size of the iOS 7.1 ipsw for the 5S is 1.43 GB. So the OTA update is pretty much reinstalling the whole OS which is the part I'm not surprised at if you are updating from a beta OS to a finalized OS. To be honest I would actually prefer the whole OS to be reinstalled than updating just the part of the OS that is need if I'm going from a beta version to the final version.
I'm just going by what I've seen and what I've picked up as common similarities. I agree on the part that the OTA update doesn't need to be that big, but only Apple know why they released the update for beta users the way they did. Apple could of released a small OTA update to finalize the OS but instead went with what looks like a full OS install, they could of forced beta users to restore to 7.1 with iTunes if they wanted to but they went with the full OS install route. I'm not surprised since Apple wanted to make it as simple and as trouble free as possible, I'm more surprised they released an OTA update for beta users to update to the public release. As far as I know they haven't done that before (correct me if I'm wrong though).
Again I'm just gathering all the info I've seen and this is the only thing that makes sense (at least to me) logically, but I could be wrong still.
I still would like to know the real reason from a professional though.
Sent from my iPhone 5S or 5th gen iPod Touch using Tapatalk