Google wants devs to reduce the size of app updates

For many mobile users, it's important to keep an eye on data usage to ensure tariff limits are not exceeded. A major contributor to gobbling up monthly bandwidth allowances is the updating of apps, and Google is taking steps to reduce the size of APK updates.

In a post on the Android Developers Blog, Google speaks directly to developers, pointing out the various steps they can take to optimize the size of updates. The company also calls for greater transparency so users know the size of updates before committing to a download.

Google is in the process of rolling out a change to the Play Store which means actual download sizes are displayed for apps, and for those that are already installed, the size of the available update is listed instead. This is an obvious change from an end user point of view, but Google wants developers to be more pro-active in optimizing downloads.

In the blog post, Anthony Morris, SWE Google Play says:

For approximately 98 percent of app updates from the Play Store, only changes (deltas) to APK files are downloaded and merged with the existing files, reducing the size of updates. We recently rolled out a delta algorithm, bsdiff, that further reduces patches by up to 50 percent or more compared to the previous algorithm. Bsdiff is specifically targeted to produce more efficient deltas of native libraries by taking advantage of the specific ways in which compiled native code changes between versions. To be most effective, native libraries should be stored uncompressed (compression interferes with delta algorithms).

Google also suggests applying the delta algorithm to APK Expansion Files, as well as removing unused resources and optimizing individual parts of APKs (such as images) to help reduce size.

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