Users shouldn't need to manage their local data, if the system works as intended. It is a new paradigm, built with trade-offs at its core. Users will sacrifice control for simplicity. And while it is different from many of its contemporaries, it is not a surprise. Had you been paying attention, you could have seen this coming last summer.

Typical users may never know about any of this. In fact, that's the point. Apple created the software to make this happen, and as long as developers follow Apple's rules, they'll be able to prepare for the way this system runs — automatically, transparently and without a user's input. To do this, Apple is claiming ultimate ownership over the file management on its hardware. It's not like a Mac or a Windows PC, where the user has access to the file system and can manage storage at will. In the new Apple TV, Apple asserts control.

On your Apple TV, these slices combine into an app, the local storage state of which tvOS manages, adding and deleting data as it deems necessary. For example, if you're running out of internal storage, tvOS reserves the right to delete data. Further, on-demand resources also carry the benefit of being less likely to be purged than data stored elsewhere, like in temporary directories or in caches. Developers can even set the priority of the assets, telling tvOS that some assets should be purged before others.

Using this architecture, all of the bits and bytes that, together, make up the whole of every Apple TV app live in some combination two places: Apple's servers and on your Apple TV. Here's how it breaks down:

Of course, Apple's servers will have to work as expected, delivering those on-demand resources quickly and transparently, for this to work. If there's an error or an outage, Apple TV users could find themselves in a situation where they can launch an app but can't play it because its required resources aren't available to download. Still, assuming Apple's servers are functional, as an Apple TV user, all you'd typically know is that you downloaded an app. You launched it and you started playing. Apple's new operating system paradigm is designed to take care of the rest.

The final category of assets lives in the cloud — iCloud, in Apple's parlance — and only gets downloaded from the App Store's servers when the app requests it. Developers have access to 20 GB of hosted, on-demand resources.

After you download and install the 200 MB initial app bundle, the app can immediately request additional items from the cloud. In fact, developers can designate up to 2 GB of resources to be downloaded automatically after installation. In Apple's parlance, those are known as "prefetched" tags. You can still launch the app, but prefetched tags are also downloading in the background, ready to add more functionality to the app.

An Apple TV developer with a tutorial level could keep the initial 200 MB app bundle small, tagging everything necessary to start the game as "initial install tags." The data users download would include the first things you'd do in the game — like, say, the tutorial.

Think of a tutorial level, an important but transient part of any game. You'll play it shortly after launching a game for the first time. But once you're done, you're unlikely to play it again. Normally, it'd live in your internal storage, consuming space regardless of whether you ever play it again.

Developers will do this with tags , which are effectively labels for groups of related resources. Used with on-demand resources, tags allow a developer to label groups of assets and store them in the cloud, where they're ready to download whenever an app needs them.

This is possible because of two Apple technologies — tagging and on-demand resources — both of which are components of Apple's larger App Thinning initiative. It's designed to divvy up apps into little pieces — think Lego blocks — that get downloaded only when they're needed. This, the theory goes, saves storage space by installing only what an app needs — and by deleting what it doesn't need.

Apple TV apps — games, social networks, video services, whatever — downloaded from the App Store have an initial 200 MB size limit. So while it's technically true that apps are constrained, that refers only to the size of the initial download. There's more to the story — and far more storage available, even if it's not guaranteed.

Apple's bold new rules are already a reality on iOS and watchOS. Developers have known about them for months. And we know why, despite their bizarre first appearance, there are practical explanations for their existence that are often every bit as interesting as a cursory glance at the 200 MB limitation.

And there's the phrase — "lack of local storage" — that set the internet aflame. It seems odd, but there is a reasonable explanation. Also, although App Thinning technology is already live on iOS 9 devices, it's optional, and the internet is not filled with outcry. Its implementation will be more aggressive on Apple TV, though. Under your TV, it's not optional.

"Along with the lack of local storage," the section continues, "the maximum size of an Apple TV app is limited to 200MB. Anything beyond this size needs to be packaged and loaded using on-demand resources. Knowing how and when to load new assets while keeping your users engaged is critical to creating a successful app."

In other words, do not assume you'll be installed, even if someone downloaded your software. But that'll be OK because of iCloud.

"There is no persistent local storage for apps on Apple TV," it reads. "This means that every app developed for the new Apple TV must be able to store data in iCloud and retrieve it in a way that provides a great customer experience."

Shortly after Apple revealed the new Apple TV last month, the company released the nascent platform's developer documentation. Designed to help those who want to get their apps on the new hardware, it advises developers of a strange limitation built into the system.

But even though most Apple TV users will never understand what makes the box and its operating system, tvOS, tick, it remains fascinating — and far more complex than the shock of a 200 MB initial app download might lead you to believe.

This shouldn't be surprising. After all, this is Apple. It's an opinionated company, confident in making controversial decisions that it believes will benefit its customers. Since its founding, Apple has been a company that loves nothing quite so much as creating small technological wonders that are drop-dead simple to use. Why would it be any different when Apple set its sights on TV?

Indifferent to the excitement and the trepidation, the new Apple TV will begin shipping this week. Though few who plug in their set-top boxes will know it, they'll become test pilots for a series of technologies that could provide a new paradigm for distributing and managing storage on computers, whether they sit in your lap, rest in your hand or live tethered to your TV. And if it works, it might have a lot to teach gaming consoles like the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Wii U.

In the weeks since Apple revealed its new set-top box, we've scoured the company's developer documentation and spoken with several game developers about the Apple TV's potential. Reactions are mixed. Some are bullish, others outright skeptical. Still others see potential but aren't ready to commit.

All of this requires some work on a developer's behalf, but it doesn't seem onerous. It also requires Apple to manage and deliver a vast array of on-demand resources consistently and, by design, transparently. That's not trivial, and though Apple has improved since the days of MobileMe, it's not a company with a sterling cloud-services reputation.

To do this, Apple is asserting control of the Apple TV's internal storage, adding and deleting data as it deems necessary without user input. But will consumers see the benefits or become annoyed when their devices automatically purge and re-download data?

There's a group of technologies at the core of the new Apple TV — and other Apple devices you may already own — that the Cupertino, California-based company created to ease technological burdens. It's called App Thinning, and Apple is already employing it to make apps more efficient and users less confused.

Peer a little deeper, though, and you find more strange departures. tvOS is content to take some control away from app makers and Apple TV users, and it does so with purpose and philosophy. In this new operating system, you can see Apple's vision for a future where apps download quickly and transparently and nobody has to worry about managing storage space. tvOS will do that for you.

To pick one prominent example, developers — including game makers — must constrain their initial app downloads to 200 MB or less. That size seems paltry on a device that ships in 32 GB and 64 GB flavors. Even on smartphones, games can be much larger than 200 MB. On Apple TV, there's far more to the story.

Listen to this story in the episode of Polygon Longform, our features podcast, below.

This week, for the first time since it debuted in 2007, the Apple TV will welcome native games. But games are far from the only first for Apple's new set-top box. Behind the scenes, apps will run on an aggressive, intelligent operating system called tvOS. In many ways, tvOS is a radical rethinking of the fundamental nature of operating systems and our relationship with them. And because of that, its rules and limitations look odd.

How it came to this: App Thinning, slicing and on-demand resources

At its Worldwide Developer's Conference in 2015, Apple's annual gathering of developers, the company revealed a new technology called App Thinning, which introduces two related concepts: slicing and on-demand resources. At WWDC, the company spoke about these in the context of iOS, the operating system that powers iPads and iPhones.

What do these have to do with the new Apple TV, given that WWDC took place in June and the Apple TV was just revealed and isn't yet out? App Thinning, slicing and on-demand resources lie at the core of Apple TV apps and the device's storage management.

Apple began with the belief that the way everything works now is grossly inefficient.

Historically, developers who created their apps in Xcode, Apple's Mac software for creating apps, wrote the code, gathered the assets, tested it and compiled the app when it was ready to be released. Compiling simply means that Xcode corralled the executable code plus associated assets like artwork and sounds and combined them all into a single file, or bundle. Developers uploaded that bundle to Apple for testing and approval. After Apple approved the app, the company set it live in the App Store.

iPad and iPhone users with devices of all sizes — both in terms of physical space and local storage — then downloaded the compiled app from the App Store. The app users downloaded was, in fact, the exact same Apple-approved bundle that the developer submitted to Apple. The bundle originated on the developer's hardware and traveled through Apple, who distributed it through the App Store — the only place that non-jailbroken iPhones and iPads can get native apps.

Pretty simple: code, test, compile, submit, receive approval, go live in the App Store.

But that simplicity also came with a cost: inefficiency.

iOS apps can run on multiple devices. Think of the various sizes of iPhones and iPads in circulation. Some apps need big icons for the iPhone 6 line. Some need small ones for the iPhone 4 line. Older devices might even need artwork that predates the high-resolution retina displays. And that doesn't even take into consideration iPads.

Because iPhones and iPads share the same operating system, universal apps enabled developers to include assets like artwork customized for every device within a single bundle. If a developer chose to make their app work on iPhones and iPads (and many do), they only needed to compile and upload a single app bundle, and it'd work everywhere. It makes life simpler, at the cost of complexities not readily apparent.

If developers made a universal app that scaled to run on smartphones and tablets, all of the assets for all of the variations lived inside that big, compiled bundle. Downloading a universal app on your iPhone meant that you received assets for all possible variations, including, say, iPad-specific artwork that you didn't need on your iPhone and would never use there. Bloated bundles were the price Apple, developers and iOS users paid for universal apps, as they were originally designed.

But Apple got fed up with inefficiency and implemented a few technologies that it believes will make its ecosystem better.

App thinning and tags: the bitcode revolution

Apple's solution to this inefficiency is broadly referred to as App Thinning. It's designed to trim app fat.

Now, developers don't upload their finished app bundles from Xcode to Apple. Instead, they upload bitcode, which is basically an uncompiled version of an app — not a working version, in other words, but a mess of code and assets that, stitched together, create an app you can run.

Per Apple's guidelines, developers should fill their code with tags, which serve as all-important markers for specific parts of an app. Apple then takes that bitcode and creates versions custom-compiled for your specific phone or tablet hardware. This is possible, in part, because tags carry meaning.

In an asset-rich game, for example, developers can tag certain images as appropriate for an iPhone 6, while tagging others as designed for an iPad 2. Apple receives the bitcode and slices it into versions, app bundles appropriate for various devices — one for the iPhone 5S, one for the iPad Air 2, one for the iPad mini and so on. The app arrives on your device full of the things you need and lacking the things you don't.

Also pretty simple: code, tag, test, upload bitcode, receive approval, go live in the App Store, with apps that Apple compiled.

The benefits of slicing

Apple calls the process of breaking an app into device-optimized versions "slicing," as in, it slices bitcode into app bundles for different devices.

If it's invisible to the user, why is Apple doing it? In part to save space. During a WWDC session explaining app slicing, Apple used an app called DemoBots to show its potential.

The original app was 77 MB, whether you were downloading it on an iPhone 4S or an iPad Air 2. By parsing and slicing DemoBots' bitcode, Apple created 19 variants of the app, each appropriate for a different device. Doing so shrunk DemoBots from a 77 MB file everyone needed to download to a series of device-specific bundles that averaged about 22 MB each.

Thus, by using App Thinning and slicing, Apple provides a clear efficiency benefit, as measured by a given app's required footprint.

But that's not the whole story. There's one more technology that Apple is using to make things even more efficient, and it's all about the cloud.

App Thinning, on-demand resources and Apple taking control

The easiest way to explain App Thinning and slicing in practice is with a game.

Like all apps, games are some combination of executable code and resources like artwork. Gmail and Infinity Blade 3 are both iOS apps, but their app bundles differ significantly. Games are, by their nature, multimedia-rich. Gmail, on the other hand, is mostly a web view of content that lives on Google's servers. In a game's app bundle, the weight distribution between executable code and resources is much more likely to tip in favor of the latter. At least in terms of storage space, games have more images and movies and sound than executable code.

Transparency, obfuscation and the Apple Way The idea is to make apps as efficient (often, but not always, a synonym for small) as possible. Thanks to app slicing, now when you download the same app on your iPhone 6S Plus and your iPad Air 2, you'll receive a version compiled specifically for the device it will run on, but you'll be none the wiser because it's invisible to users. This kind of technological obfuscation is a core tenet of how Apple treats technology. Apple believes that its job is to bring technology to the masses in simple, easy-to-understand ways. Perhaps the best example is iTunes. For more than a decade, the app has ingested and organized audio files to manage them for users. Knowing where any particular file lives in a computer's rat's nest of a file system is irrelevant. Apple, through iTunes, takes care of the mundanity of organization for everyone who uses iTunes, in large part by obfuscating the file system. iTunes, a cross-platform app, is an exception in one important way. Apple typically controls the hardware and creates the software that runs on it. The company sees this as its strength and always has. It wants to use that strength to do some of the heavy lifting for those in its ecosystem. At its core, that's what App Thinning is all about. If you own an iPhone, you don't need to know if you have a 32-bit or a 64-bit chip running armv7, armv7s or arm64. All you'll know is that you downloaded an app. But behind the scenes, Apple will have provided you a variant of the app, based on bitcode, compiled specifically for each device. You won't get 32-bit code if you have a 64-bit device, or 1x resolution images if you have a 3x resolution device. The upshot for users is that they won't waste space on their devices storing unnecessary files. And that, the theory goes, will make users' lives easier, producing fewer scenarios where they have to consider or manage available storage on their devices. But to do this, Apple has to take some amount of control away from every user. The company has already done so on iOS devices. Apple TV will follow that precedent — and be more aggressive about it from the start.

Imagine an iOS game called Barbie: War. It has 10 levels. This imaginary app works like most games, where you can't get to level 10 without completing the nine levels that precede it. Because of App Thinning, you can download only the code and resources you need for your device.

Apple can't know how much of the game any downloader will play. But it does know that even the players who will eventually make it to level 10 and defeat the treacherous Dark Lord of the Horses do not need access to the final level when they first launch Barbie: War. And if they don't need it now, then why make them download it right now?

What if there were a way to give downloaders what they need only when they need it? Well, there is, and it's called on-demand resources. Because the files that make up apps are tagged from their inception, it's possible to correlate tags with levels and slice games into bite-sized chunks.

In our example, Barbie: War's initial download consists of assets like the executable code, splash screen artwork and the first three levels. As you play through the game and approach level four, the app begins to download the resources it knows you'll need, like audio files and images that are specific to levels four and five — the levels you'll soon be playing.

Thus, the thinking goes, Apple and developers can further increase efficiency not only by slicing apps into their device-appropriate components, but by giving app users only the parts of the apps they need when they need them — or even before they need them, through prediction — and enabling sliced apps to download additional resources at will from the 20 GB of storage space that Apple provides in iCloud.

Consider the potential difference between the way it used to work and the way it will work.

Before app slicing, Apple treated apps as all-or-nothing bundles. That meant that you couldn't start playing Barbie: War until the multi-gigabyte file that included levels one to 10 (and all of the resources created for other devices, resources you didn't need and would never use) finished downloading. But with a combination of App Thinning, slicing and on-demand resources, users can get the essential components of a game — things like the executable code, the splash screen that loads when you launch the app, the title screen artwork — in the initial download and reserve downloading for, say, levels eight to 10 until players approach them by completing the prerequisite levels. Levels four to 10 live in the cloud, tagged, and Barbie: War's developers can say when the game should start downloading the assets tagged for specific levels.

This is possible because Apple provides developers with cloud-based storage accessible at any time — or on demand.

Where tvOS apps live

Because of Apple's technology, apps can live in four places:

On your device in the app bundle

On your device in an on-demand resources container

In a special section of iCloud where small bits of data, like game saves, are stored

In a section of iCloud that exists to push larger amounts of data, like sounds and enemies from late-game levels, from the cloud and onto a device where it will live in local storage only when needed

To further increase efficiency, on-demand resources do not become part of an app's core bundle, the initial app download. Instead, they live in a separate space in a device's internal storage. One benefit to that approach is that always-available, on-demand resources won't get backed up to iCloud, and therefore won't count against your total cloud storage.

The other side of efficiency

App Thinning and its associated technologies aren't just about putting things onto your devices. There's another aspect of this efficiency equation that isn't about adding but removing content: Apple reserves the right to reclaim space on its devices, and on-demand resources are ripe for the picking.

Apple will purge on-demand resources to free up space, under the assumption that they will always remain available to download again.

By the time you get to Barbie: War level seven, tagging and on-demand resources even allow Apple's software to begin deleting previously downloaded data. Assuming you won't want to replay level two at that moment, Apple's operating systems could purge that data as it downloads levels eight and nine.

This could also be helpful in a scenario where an iPhone user wants to download a new app but is running out of local storage space. The operating system can delete some portion of locally stored on-demand resources. It will attempt to do this intelligently, because iOS will know which apps you use and how often you use them.

The benefit is that Apple will manage your device's storage, transparently, so that you don't have to. And it's easy to see the upside. Anyone who understands a computer's file system knows how many people remain baffled by the concept of nested folders, even in 2015.

A potential downside, however, is that the next time you launch Barbie: War, you may have to download levels from on-demand storage again.

Imagine that several months have passed since Barbie: War's release, and your brief but intense infatuation has subsided. The app sits buried in a folder, gathering digital dust, and Apple's software knows this.

Today, without even thinking about storage space or Barbie: War, you want to download Star Wars: Battle Chess. But you don't have room. Apple's operating system knows this, and it deletes Barbie: War's on-demand resources to make room for Star Wars: Battle Chess.

The same thing could happen as you play through your new game and it requires more on-demand resources. Unbeknownst to you, Apple's software secretly purges the resources of another game you haven't played in months, Imagine: Steelworking, secure in the knowledge that you aren't playing it much these days and that, if you ever decide to again, it can begin downloading the purged resources as soon as you need them.

Apple's solution assumes that its devices are covered in a warm blanket of internet connectivity. This makes sense for the Apple TV, which will live in a home, or iPhones, which have cellular connectivity built in. It makes less sense for devices like the iPod Touch and some iPads, which don't always have internet connections.

It could also present a data cost problem. If an Apple device user's storage space is in a constant state of being nearly full, downloading and re-downloading data could increase data usage and out-of-pocket expenses. But Apple's focus on bite-sized tags, which are relatively small (Apple calls 64 MB the "ideal size" for tags, but allows tags for resources up to 512 MB) and relatively quick to download, could help mitigate that potential problem.

Cranking it up to 11 on Apple TV

On the new Apple TV, Apple is taking these ideas and technologies to their logical conclusions.

Where tvOS apps live Because of App Thinning, Apple TV apps can live in four places: On your device in the app bundle

On your device in an on-demand resources container or temporary caches

In a special section of iCloud where small bits of data like game saves are stored

In a section of Apple's cloud-based storage that exists to push larger amounts of data like sounds and enemies from late-game levels from the cloud and onto a device where it will live in local storage as long as it's needed

It's not just that Apple might purge on-demand resources. Apple explicitly warns that developers shouldn't even assume they're entitled to the minimum amount of storage that their initial app bundle occupies on the device. Apple reserves the right to purge that, too.

This, ultimately, explains Apple's strict rules about Apple TV apps. The company is asserting full control over the available space on the device and will delete an app without warning or notice if need be.

The saving grace, assuming the technology works as intended, is that re-downloading could be nothing more than a momentary inconvenience. For those who cover their Apple TV in a blanket of broadband, downloading 200 MB should be nearly instantaneous.

But nearly isn't the same as instantaneous, and that's bound to cause some frustration.

Just as with its requirement to use the included Siri remote to control all Apple TV games, Apple seems to be solving for the greatest number of use cases. Initial downloads will all be paltry, which means the time between downloading and playing a game should be lightning-fast. And if Apple TV users get used to quickly downloading apps, that might mitigate the pain of re-downloading them, too.

And, under normal circumstances, this shouldn't even be something that Apple TV users confront unless and until they begin running low on internal storage space, at which point tvOS will begin purging data behind the scenes.

That's the technology and the theory behind it. But what about game developers, a group that Apple is actively courting? What do they think of Apple's unique rules?