android New Algorithm in Google Play Focuses on Smaller App Updates

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New Algorithm in Google Play Focuses on Smaller App Updates

 

 

The new delta algorithm for Google Play rolled out recently

 

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Google Play has just received a new algorithm and Google announced that Android users installed over 64 billion apps in the past year from the Google Play Store. Seeing how many developers push necessary updates to their apps and some users are concerned about storage and mobile data, Google's new algorithm aims at reducing the size of app updates.

 

The information about the new algorithm appeared on Android Developers blog, together with tips on how app developers can reduce the size of their APK. Delta updates are more efficient ways in bringing improvements to applications. A delta update only updates certain files in the APK, without having the need to update the whole APK. Google stated that 98% of app updates are delta updates to the APK, which also helped users save data.

 

 

The new algorithm does much more than that, it's named bsdiff and it was created to make updates and app downloads smaller, so that they wouldn't take that much out of data plans. Google announced that the new delta update can reduce the size of patches by 50% or more. Bsdiff was created to produce more efficient deltas of native libraries and take advantage of ways in which native code changes between versions.

 

Information about data used and download size is displayed in a clearer way

 

The blog provided an example of Google Chrome, whose latest major update from M46 to M47 had a patch size of 22.8MB, which was reduced using Bsdiff to 12.9MB. The M47 minor update had a size of 15.3MB and was reduced to just 3.6MB.

 

 

But that's not all, APK Expansion Files allows developers to include additional large files up to 2GB in size, like high resolution graphics or media files. Download size of initial installs can be reduced by 12%, while update by 65% in average.

 

Google Play Store now displays information about data used and download sizes in a more clearer way. Users can view the actual download size, not just the APK size. The changes have already started rolling out.

 

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