Downloads to mobile devices

Hi there,

Without launching into too technical a discussion, I’d first like to try and explain what the EDD folks were referring to. Computers like Macs or Windows have traditional file systems where everything lives in harmony, so to speak. Apps are able to save files to the filesystem much more easily. And similarly, with Android phones, this is also the case. The difference with iOS though is how the system was designed. Because Apple controls both the hardware AND software, they essentially created their own walled garden in terms of how apps can communicate with the storage space on the phone. Apple simply doesn’t just let apps save things like attachments where ever you want. It all depends on which apps you have installed. For example, if I have Gmail and Dropbox and iCloud drive on my phone, I’m able to save Gmail attachments into either Dropbox, or iCloud drive, or any other cloud storage I have set up.
Basically, how/where you can save files all depends on which apps the user will have installed on their phone.

Maybe that was a bit more long-winded than I expected. Sorry about that ??
So the EDD folks were correct in that it comes down to limitations within the iOS operating system that runs on iPads and iPhones.

That being said, we haven’t come across any of our users having issues with what you’re looking to do.

I hope that helps explain things a bit, rather than just leaving you with more questions than when you started!

Thanks Sean.

So as I understand:

You are still able to download an mp3 file to an iphone – depending on what apps you’re using. In other words – this is NOT restricted across the board and CAN work on an iphone or ipad.

This sounds right as I have definitely had customers in the past who were able to download my mp3 files directly to their iphone.

But also – you are talking about saving files from the net to your icloud or dropbox etc – an external storage. I’m talking about saving audio files (specifically) in the phone storage itself. (I, for one, NEVER use an external storage for my files and never will – everything is saved directly on my computer or phone).

If iOS doesn’t allow saving files from the net directly on the phone – that’s really bad and extremely user- UNfriendly. I will check this with Apple.

In this case and in the context of my communication with EDD who took a very long time to test and troubleshoot before giving me this answer (?), I suspect that my issue is not related to this generic restriction but they were unable to fix it and so used this broader issue as an excuse. People were getting an error message: “You have exceeded the download limit for this file” which was not true as per the settings.

Anyway – I have already decided to move away from EDD for a number of other reasons and will download woocommerce.

The main thing is, as you have said, that you haven’t come accross this download issue reported by your plugin users.

How do you think people overcome this issue then? does everyone save files to iCloud? what advice can I give to my customer who is unable to download my file to their iphone?

PS the link to this thread I got in the email is not working for some reason – returns a blank page.

I have found the answer.

These download issues are indeed, caused by some bugs in the EDD plugin.

Several of my customers who were stuck on the download to their iphone / ipad were able to download the same files from another site, bypassing my Store, directly to their Apple mobile devices without ANY issues! When they made the purchase and were not able to download the product, I uploaded my audio files to a dropbox type of site and gave them access for download. NO problem whatsoever with those downloads!

If direct mp3 file downloads from the internet were not allowed by iOS, my customers would NOT be able to download them from another site either. And yet they can. The difference – they bypass my EDD store.

This (plus few other download issues) points to the EDD issue with downloads to mobile devices.

I’m downloading Woocommerce now!

Hi @magicpowers,

That’s great to hear. I’m glad you were able to find out what was causing the issue. Good luck with WooCommerce! ??

I’m going to mark this as resolved – if you have any further questions, you can start a new thread.

Cheers!