Earlier this year, Google announced it had shrunk app updates by 47 percent, but it turns out that was just the start as the Android platform owner has further boosted its compression abilities.
The new compression leads to 6 petabytes of data being saved per day across Google Play – reducing the strain on networks, saving data usage, and getting users going faster with the latest versions. With apps increasing significantly in size – particularly games – this will be welcome news for both consumers and developers.
Android developers are not required to do anything for their users to benefit from the File-by-File patching system, but it’s currently being limited to users with ‘auto-updates’ enabled. This is due to hardware limitations on legacy devices, but as these get phased out this will likely change.
