I just got an Ipad mini a couple of months ago. Its my first Apple product. Seems like there's an awful lot of updates. Is this normal? I got it specifically for Foreflight.
Apple is generally known for being "slow to update" for even significant security bugs.
What you're seeing is an industry wide behavior of "continuous deployment" of generally buggy and poorly tested software, because the ubiquitous always-on network allows such behavior. Not really just an Apple thing.
Multiply the problem if you've installed say, 100 Apps on an iOS device. You'll be needing to update it daily... which... Apple has recognized and made an option in the settings. Apps will happily auto-update nearly constantly if you let them.
If you have two or three iOS devices, one tactic is to allow one to auto-update, sync it to iTunes and let iTunes sync shove all those constantly updating Apps onto the other devices via the local LAN instead of all three devices going all the way to Apple. Or forcing iTunes to do the App updates completely, and then sync the devices, but there's no automation of that on iTunes yet. You can only trigger iTunes to download automatically upon new App purchase. Not updates.
Many folks also recommend not updating Apps like Foreflight right before a flight in case of problems with a release. I haven't run into any significant problems with this, but I do tell one iPad not to auto-update anything.
Keep in mind also that Foreflight maps and data is updated both on the standard release schedule of FAA and also updated if there are any errors found in the data. Those added on to the iOS, App, and Foreflight updates themselves, means that owning three or more iOS devices can turn into a part-time job to update them, if you don't leverage the automation.
The one I really want but probably will never see, is automated background Foreflight updates. I have unlimited cell data as well as the iPads are almost always sitting in coverage of either my office or home WiFi all day long, and it's a total PITA to have to remember to fire up ForeFlight to update charts on multiple devices. I usually end up doing it in a "batch session" where all three devices are sitting on the desk doing updates at the same time.
As an aside to that, it's really stupid to download that data three times. It'd be great if one device has the newer data and they're all sitting on the same LAN subnet, that they could simply "share" the data, similar to the "LAN sync" behavior of something like Dropbox.
Anyway... That's the fun of updates. LOL. The usefulness of Foreflight makes it worth putting up with relatively "dumb" computers that aren't programmed to keep themselves updated, instead of making a human operator do it. I'd happily turn on FULL automation of updates from iOS, to Apps, to App data and just ignore it and live with the relatively rare fallout of an error once in a while (of course, in IT we also have this concept of a "clean roll-back" which nothing currently being coded bothers with these days and would fix that problem...) rather than be a slave to poking at three devices to get them to stay current on everything.
Seems like we created computers to do repetitive and menial tasks, instead of creating more of them, eh? LOL.
I've been playing with it and haven't had any problems...
I haven't flown with it yet so 
