Best prectices for loadig assets

I did a similar app which was a brochure-ware type app. You'll want to bake in enough assets into your app to help the user get the rest of the assets. At that point, can the user choose which assets they want to download or are you expecting to download the assets as they use the app?

Thing is, if you're going to have them download all the assets when you first start the app there's no difference in just baking in all those assets into the app itself. I have a 1200mb app I downloaded. It took a while but no big deal. Most trailers are over 150mb for 720p and you don't even notice it.

Take a couple things into consideration. If you baked in the assets then the user downloads everything they need all at once. If you don't, they install a smaller app but then need to wait to get the assets to use the app which isn't a good experience. If at that point you don't save the assets locally permanently then they may re-launch the app and download them again and again using excess unnecessary bandwidth.

Also a larger app (>100mb) can download in the background while your user can do other things. You are very limited with what you can do while backgrounded so if your app tries to download assets after the user installs it and the user multitasks, they'll stop downloading until foregrounded. There is even a limit to what you can do regarding cpu and network usage when backgrounded in Xcode and we don't even have access to that, AIR just stops.

BTW an iOS file is an .ipa not an .apk. .apk is Android.

I would consider just baking in those assets, or give the user a way to choose if they want to download them and store them permanently in the applicationStorageDirectory (with the non-backup bit enabled).