MGP is still using an enormous amount of iPad memory.
I’ve seen this also. Not certain as to cause. Are you importing/exporting a lot of grids? Use iCloud or Dropbox or OneDrive?
Hi JTB,
Thanks for flagging this — 11 GB is clearly not acceptable and you deserve a straight answer.
Why it happens
Every button in MetaGrid Pro stores its icon as an independent copy directly in the database. If you have 500 buttons all using the same custom icon, that icon is stored 500 times. With large profiles like your Cubase setup, the number of buttons across 38 profiles adds up to potentially thousands of individual icon copies. There’s no deduplication happening at the storage layer.
Why we built it this way
The blob-per-button approach was a deliberate design decision to make profile export and import fully self-contained. When you export a profile, every icon travels with it — no missing assets, no broken buttons on the receiving device, no dependency on the other person having the same custom icons installed. That reliability is worth preserving, and any deduplication solution has to keep exports working the same way. The storage cost of that decision only becomes visible at the scale of a setup like yours.
What we’ve fixed now
We’ve added a size cap of 512×512 pixels on custom icons — both on the Mac side before they’re sent to the iPad, and on the iPad side before they’re written to the database. This prevents oversized source images from bloating storage going forward. We’ve also added a one-time cleanup that runs on the next update which will recompress any existing oversized icons already in your database.
Honest caveat: if your custom icons were already reasonably sized, this update won’t dramatically reduce your current 11 GB. The resize fix caps future growth and helps users with large source images, but it doesn’t address the core duplication problem.
What’s coming in 1.7
The real fix is deduplication — restructuring how icons are stored so that 500 buttons using the same icon store it once, not 500 times. This requires a database model change which we’re scheduling for 1.7. That’s the update that will actually reclaim the bulk of your current 11 GB.
Sorry this has taken this long to surface — it only becomes visible at the scale of a setup like yours.
Thanks for the explanation.
I don’t use custom icons - they never scaled right for some reason, even though I created them 512 x 512 in Windows 3D Paint.
Quick update:
I reinstalled MGP again and now my iPad memory for MGP on iPad #1 is 497 MB. I’ll keep you posted.