The availability of highly resourceful and rocking apps at our disposal, has actually revolutionized the world of technology. It has provided a wild world of entertainment to the users and has also contributed significantly towards smartly reducing their work. However the problem arises when the users have to download the apps. With the increase in the growth and development in the apps section, the technical intricacies being included in the same have caused the apps to be heavy weighing and it becomes a daunting task to download the same.
If you have been over the time perturbed and annoyed by the constant requirements of having a broad band connection prior to downloading the app, you may be further aggravated by the recent announcement of Android team.
In the recent announcement, Android team gave the liberty to the mobile app developers to attach two extra files, along with the app, each being of file size 2 GB. Thus the ultimate app may weight somewhere around 4 GB if any developer make use of this provision.
We are providing you with the internal statement of the company, regarding this announcement:
Android applications have historically been limited to a maximum size of 50MB. This works for most apps, and smaller is usually better — every megabyte you add makes it harder for your users to download and get started. However, some types of apps, like high-quality 3D interactive games, require more local resources.
So today, we’re expanding the Android app size limit to 4GB.
The good news is that Google has volunteered to host all of the files and hence the smaller shops would be relieved of to the burden to support the colossal file sizes of the hosted files.
Android team is hopeful that these changes in the file size will provide better scope and opportunities to the mobile app developers and they will be able to include much advanced and engrossing features like 3D graphics, audio and video etc in the apps. Before downloading the apps, the users will be intimated about the large file size of the apps in question and thus, prior to downloading the app, you can ensure if you are on a fast speed connection or not. You can save it for the later download and even if the connection is lost, the download will resume later.
Though this new innovation is great for the app developers, we are just hopeful that developers make the judicious use of the liberty being offered in terms of app size. If every developer start blotting their apps up “not really required” features or perhaps skip the step to optimize the website for superior performance on a mobile platform, it will only add to the helplessness of the users. If each of the app happens to be larger in size, the users would require quick storage updates and large storage capacities to sustain the same.
That is awesome. The experience of download a high quality game on Android Market and then have to download the data (usually quite big) from the game company server (that can be slow/unavailable/unstable) is frustrating. Be able to download it from Google itself and the possibility to pause/resume is great.
PREDICTION: Google is preparing for Online Learning Videos being added to the app store.
The only thing that comes to mind is that they’re preparing for an onslaught of media like Movies (which is the only thing that would take up that much space).
That is a bit sad. In most every case applications can easily shrink in size. On my ipad the other day I noticed I had several games (little more than flash junk, not massive 3d assets) that were 300+MB in size with one at 600MB. When your silly game is using almost 1/10 of the space on my device something is wrong. Compare this to Google books which is 3MB! Props to that group for doing it right. Large downloads can mean download errors, users can cancel the download, users that forget about the app and never run it… And even 50MB assumes that they have a reasonable connection, imaging most of the world that doesn’t have 3G trying to download several GB. Maybe their shouldn’t be a limit, but apps should be some sort of incentive system (rewarded for small downloads and penalized otherwise?)
Apples and oranges. Apps like e-readers are mostly code and have only a few images assets for icons, logos, etc. A game has a large code base, but it also can have tons and tons of image assets for textures, as well as video and audio assets. While obviously you don’t have to have all of that for a great game, I don’t think you can say that just because such an app is large it could easily be smaller without impacting the quality of the final experience. Look at Battlefield 3 on the consoles, where they had to use two DVDs because the texture files wouldn’t fit.
I would understand if Battlefield3 used up a lot of space, but when apps similar to the complexity of bejeweled are using hundreds of MB clearly the developer is just being lazy. Most apps/games on my ipad seem to be around 20MB so when there are a few that are 20 times larger they quickly get deleted.
As for Google books, they clearly took the time and effort to make their download small. Even “hello world” flashlight type apps on my ipad are bigger in size. And saying their app doesn’t do much as the reason is also silly (ibooks in comparison is 50MB). I single them out as they definitely did take the extra little bit of time to make their package small.
Go into itunes and view your apps by size. You might be surprised what is small and what is big.
This changes nothing. App developers that needed more than 50mb would just download assets after they downloaded the app. So a small app download (1-2 megs) and then another 500mb of assets. Usually only games did this.
This really doesn’t make much of a difference outside of the fact that the download now comes from Google’s servers which are much faster than the game companies servers.
Also, this is probably to accommodate the crazy 3d games that nvidia is pushing.
The android market also auto-cancels your purchase if you are unable to download the app after a set period of time. I found this out when I bricked my kindle fire after trying to get the marketplace to work(it would allow the purchase, but couldn’t download the new app).
This change would probably help fix issues where the user can’t download the content, but could download the app through the market.
This really sucks if you have an old phone on a crappy connection.
Awesome, I can fit four of these on my galaxy nexus.
Many 3D games already take that much space.
The new limit means that instead of installing large resource files that need to be hosted on your own infrastructure and downloaded through your own code, you can now have Google host these files for you. This also improves the user experience, because there is no second tier install process and the users sees the correct space requirements on the market page.
Touche. Solid arguments. Keep up the great work.
amazing news and image.
This is really good news from Google. Being able to directly download from Google and along with the option of pause and resume it at a later time. So you need not worry even if you lose access to internet all of a sudden. It is good for downloading large amount of files like movies and huge game applications. Thanks for sharing this information.