They spend a lot of money trying to offer competitive features on their flights - like maybe watching streaming videos on the plane enabled by the app. To the extent that passengers can't finish a 439MB download of the app just before they board, the app size wastes investments in services of the airline.
Don’t these airplane steaming services have a local copy of all the movies on some storage device inside the plane?
I wonder how crazy it would be to cache the iOS app… like maybe they run a caching transparent proxy on the plane… or some crazy relationship with a CDN that treats each plane as an edge node.
I dunno, it would probably be pretty be way to expensive to set up something like that to be worthwhile.
