“Smartapp updates” downloads only the incremental portion of apps; another brilliancy from Google
The “Smartapp updates” is aimed at reducing the bytes users, carriers and the Google servers suffer while updates for an already downloaded app are in progress.
Like we have said before, we cannot stop appreciating this company Google. If you attended the whole of Google I/O earlier this year, amongst all the new unveilings you may well remember the “smartapp updates” unveiled alongside.
The “smartapp updates” is aimed at reducing the bytes users, carriers and the Google servers suffer while updates for an already downloaded app are in progress. The application packages (apk) of these updates earlier used to download the whole of the app again; meaning if the size of the app was 10MB and the new update required 3MB of additional download, the update would download the entire apk again (old+new) which in this case converged to a total of 13MB.
The “smartapp updates” which was pushed in a very clandestine manner with the new version of the Google Play store (3.8.15) would download only the additional 3MB instead of the entire 10MB of apk.
The example of 13 MB is actually taken from the recent Instagram update brng the photomap and infinite scrolling features pushing the version to v3.0. Both the updates consisted of 3MB and the smartapp update ended up downloading only that portion.
This way both Google and the Play Store users will save enormous amounts of data. A very very welcome update; one of the best!
Ankur
