Next time you’re around your parents have a look at how many app updates are pending – I bet its lots! Convincing Joe public to update their apps is difficult enough at the best of times, many just ignoring the pop ups and warnings. Afraid they will break something or it cost them loads of money. Although now data charges will not be in the pile of worries – Google has made Android app updates much smaller.
At Google I/o this year, Google announced that android app updates would be much smaller thanks to a new compression algorithm. Meaning that each app update would be on average 47% smaller than they were. Now it seems Google has been watching too much Silicon Valley, as they are making them 65% smaller using File-by-File patching.
Google goes into lots of details on their blog post, which may be well above the majority of user’s knowledge. Though the examples they give show some huge savings of data allowances which will be particularly useful where data access is at a premium.
This will also be much greener for the environment; all these android app updates need powering in one for or another. Google estimates that all of the compression with add up to 6 petabytes of user data saved per day!
Android App Updates Automatically
These new savings will only be active when apps are updating in the background, so you will not see the size differences when you tap to update an app manually. Google are giving more increased benefit to popping that tick in the ‘update automatically’ box in your Google Play Store app settings.
If you want to get all nerdy and find out exactly how it will work, head over to Google Github page and dig around. The Archive Patcher Project is completely open source so it will not only benefit users, but also developers and creators alike.