Google shrinks the size of Android app updates by at least 65pc

Though most of the updates improve app functionality and user interface, they also eat up a lot of data in the process. And with ever increasing the stream of applications and their updates, many people often choose not to go for the updates. But, not anymore.

Google has found a fix for this problem that could radically shrink the size of updates by at least 65 percent. This new approach, called File-by-File patching, is completely different from the previous algorithm which Google started using to reduce file (apk) sizes on the Play Store.

The technique revolves around spotting changes in the uncompressed files (that is when they're not squeezed into a typical app package). Google first decompresses the old and new app versions to determine the changes between files and create a patch. After that, updating is just a matter of unpacking the app on your device, applying changes and compressing it again.

So that you don’t sit and stare at your screen, Google has decided to only enable the new file-by-file patching for automatic updates. If you initiate an update manually, more data will likely be downloaded, but the process should be finished more quickly.

Most of the new smartphones, with 3 GB/4 GB of RAM, should easily be able to deliver on the processing front for this tech to be successfully deployed to all. “This ensures that users won’t have to wait any longer than usual for an update to finish when manually updating an app,” says the blog post.

While Google says app updates are now about 65 percent smaller on average, in some cases the updates are as much as 92 percent smaller. For instance, the full Netflix app is 16.2MB, but a recent update is jut 1.2MP.