Google Play continues to grow rapidly. Thus, developers move to update their apps more frequently to push great new content, patch security vulnerabilities, and iterate quickly on user feedback. However, many users are sensitive to the amount of data they use, especially if they are not on Wi-Fi.
Google has rolled out a few improvements to reduce data that needs to be transferred for app installs and updates, making data cost more transparent to users.
The new ‘delta’ algorithm, bsdiff being used to reduce the size of app updates has been claimed to save around 50 per cent data compared to the previous method. In addition, the algorithm will also allow users to see the amount of data it will take to download.
To explain it further, the company used Chrome updates as an example, highlighting that a major update went from 22.8MB to 12.9MB and a minor one shrunk from 15.3MB to 3.6MB.
Users can now see actual download sizes in the Play Store. If you already have an app, you will only see the update size.
