Google Play Store will make the actual size of apps more transparent to its users by displaying the information more clearly.
Google Play Store will make the actual size of apps more transparent to its users by displaying the information more clearly. Google, which initially only displayed the APK file size; will now show the actual file size in the Play Store and data used. “You can now see actual download sizes, not the APK file size, in the Play Store. If you already have an app, you will only see the update size. These changes are rolling out now,” said Anthony Morris, SWE Google Play in a blogpost. The new data algorithm rolled out by Google will also reduce the size of app updates and allow users to optimise parts of APK to make them smaller.
According to the post, for about 98 per cent of app updates, only changes to APK files are downloaded and merged with existing files. This reduces the size of updates. Now, Google’s new algorithm for Play Store will further reduce the patches by up to 50 per cent. The compression algorithms are capable of reducing the download size of initial installs of a file as large as 2GB by 12 per cent, and updates by 65 per cent.
The download size and disk size are neither the same as the original APK file size nor necessarily correlated, according to the blogpost. “Chrome found that initial download size remained the same by not compressing the native library in their APK, while the APK size increased, because Google Play already performs compression for downloads,” says Morris.
The blogpost advises users to remove unnecessary data like like unused resources and code from the APK to reduce its size. Further, parts of APk can be optimised to them smaller. This can be achieved using more efficient file formats like WebP instead of JPEG.
Disk space and app sizes has been one of the pain points for smartphone users. With the new update, users will clearly be shown app sizes so that they can decide whether to download an app or not. This is especially important because graphic-heavy games and VR games usually end up eating a lot of disk space.