Android app updates will get drastically smaller, again

Updating apps on your mobile device isn't just a matter of a few seconds anymore; with apps (games, especially) steadily rising in size, a larger set of updates can easily grow into gigabytes of data and many minutes of downloading.

Google addressed the issue earlier this year by switching to a new compression algorithm, which the company says reduced the size of app updates by 47 percent on average.

Now, the company has made even bigger progress by using an app updating technique called File-by-File patching which makes app updates 65 percent smaller on average compared with the full app.

According to Google, the overall data savings will add up to 6 petabytes per day, making the internet that much less clogged for all of us.

For a detailed overview of how File-by-File patching works, see Google's blog post, or go to the project's Github page.

The most interesting bit for the majority of us are the real-world examples which show how much this technique can reduce the size of an app update. For example, an update to Google Maps was previously 17.5MB; now, with File-by-File patching applied, only 9.6MB.

Android developers don't need to do anything for File-by-File patching to be applied to their apps. But for now, Google is limiting the new patching technology to auto-updates, or updates that happen in the background, usually at night.

This is due to hardware limitations on older phones, as the new tech requires more processing power. As phones get more and more powerful, this is likely to change in the future.