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Google Further Shrinks the Size of Android App Updates (engadget.com)
Google says it has found and implemented a new way to make app updates on Android smaller. From a report on Engadget: They're introducing a new approach to app updates that promises to radically shrink the size of updates with "file-by-file" patching. The resulting patches tend to be about 65 percent smaller than the app itself, and are sometimes over 90 percent smaller. In the right circumstances, that could make the difference between updating while you're on cellular versus waiting until you find WiFi. The technique revolves around spotting changes in the uncompressed files (that is, when they're not squeezed into a typical app package). Google first decompresses the old and new app versions to determine the changes between files and create a patch. After that, updating is just a matter of unpacking the app on your device, applying changes and compressing it again.
Get smaller patch sizes by compressing the things that people actually change... didn't git do something like this?
Now, if only there were a way to shrink the update further by transferring only the parts of files that have changed -- in other words, the information that's actually different...
Provided some simple apps can be north of 100MB, I very much welcome that you can update without redownloading everything. That is particularly true for apps that insist on being at the latest version to run.
Always amazed out the fact innovation coming out of that place
Especially the updating over Cellular vs, WiFi thing.
I regularly get updates (yeah, some of us do) that try to force going over WiFi, despite my having set updates over both Cellular (Mobile) and WiFi and expecting these to happen. Whether the carrier, Google Play Store, or the app dev do this, they try to force these over WiFi, size not being an obvious factor.
So I have to manually trigger these.
Morons. What fun it is to have WiFi enabled on my phone during lunch, when I walk by 6 different 'open' hotspots, each of which wants me to accept some T&C whatever, and each latches onto my phone and prevents it from even receiving SMS until I do something. Yes. T-Mobile. Probably due to WiFi Calling, I bet.
It's not all kittens and glitter out there. Stuff sometimes doesn't really work like ti was expected to, and I should not complain. Much. I get paid to deal with these sorts of problems, and if I were not, or they did not happen, I would have to work for a living.
It's not hard work to point out the obvious, just annoying.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Because even unlimited plans are limited......pick one and there's a cap (usually right around 22GB for some reason) where the speed will drop. If you hit that cap often enough, you'll be dropped from the carrier. It's in the fine print.
And they aren't "cheap" unless you're a single person making decent money or with few other bills to pay. Family plans save money vs a bunch of individual plans, but they still aren't cheap.
What a novel concept nobody has ever implemented before. Certainly worthy of patent protection.
Yes, you stupid idiot. It turns out that phone service all over the world is not the same. If you actually crawled out of the basement and walked your fat ass outside and traveled a little bit you might know that.
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How old is deltarpm? I'm sure that deb packages must have something analogous. The funny thing is there has been some chatter on fedora-devel about removing delta rpms. Supposedly it's no longer considered useful anymore. Don't recall what's the status on that.
What happens to the app signatures when you do this?
for tech companies that reduce the need for a commodity that their major distributors are over-profiting from.
How many American citizens can Finland's immigration absorb?
Unlimited data plans have been very cheap for several years now.
Not in Slashdot's home country.
In some more remote parts of the U.S., the only option for high-speed home Internet is satellite, and satellite doesn't have unmetered data during waking hours. In other remote parts, such as East Buchanan, Iowa, DSL is harshly metered as well.
Cellular carrier T-Mobile has introduced an unmetered plan, whose name reminds one of synthetic motor oil. But at $70 per month for the first of four lines on a plan, it's more expensive than metered plans, and it puts the subscriber at the back of QoS after using 25 GB in a month. Furthermore, in some parts of the U.S., Verizon is the only cellular carrier with adequate coverage, and Verizon has refused to offer unmetered plans.
So, they're slowly moving towards a version of rsync that's aware of zip files. Hell, zip files are compressed per-file, so it doesn't even need to be aware of the compression.
And Microsoft is also looking at differential updates. Seems everyone is busy reinventing rsync or zsync.