I'm not sure how it would be crippled. Say they cap it so your iphone will upload 10% of the amount it downloads for an update. Right away we just took 10% of the load off the main Apple servers and very few people would be affected by uploading 100MB of a 1GB update over wifi.
I'm not suggesting the whole thing become p2p, but that the p2p network assist the dedicated distribution servers. For me, just the local p2p would halve the number of updates pulled from Apples servers because there are 2 of the same apple product on the same local network.
Obviously Apple doesn't need to do this because they are flawlessly pushing out updates every week but if they were struggling with distribution, this is a proven working system that windows uses.
Imagine all the iPhones that aren't on Wi-Fi when they get such an emergency update request: they'll melt the mobile networks trying to download 2 GB each.
The idea doesn't work.
This is why Apple devices check for updates once a week, staggered. The load is therefore mostly constant, other than the hardcore ones who manually check for an update once they hear one is available.
In this situation they could stagger the updates over the night. If you look at the network usage graphs from ISPs and such you can see that downloads drop to about 5% of the network capacity at the 00:00 - 06:00 times. There is a lot of spare capacity to push out updates at night which uses a tiny amount of data compared to the video calls and streaming that go on during waking hours.
As a side note, upload rates seem to be somewhat constant at all hours. I assume it must all be IoT security cameras.
I'm not suggesting the whole thing become p2p, but that the p2p network assist the dedicated distribution servers. For me, just the local p2p would halve the number of updates pulled from Apples servers because there are 2 of the same apple product on the same local network.
Obviously Apple doesn't need to do this because they are flawlessly pushing out updates every week but if they were struggling with distribution, this is a proven working system that windows uses.