Google adds Smart App Updates to the Play Store


Google has been doing a lot of maintenance to its Play App Store recently. Just this morning, we found out that Google is in the process of adding gift card and wish list support to the Android Play App Store. Today, Google has enabled Smart App updates, which was initially revealed back at Google I/O.

Usually, when one wants to update an application on their Android smartphone, the whole application is downloaded by the Google Play Store, which can take quite a while with the larger apps and if you have a slow connection. Now, Smart Apps only downloads the difference between the two apps allowing both the Google Play Store and the user large amounts of data previously wasted.

For example, the new Instagram app only required me to download 3MB of the 13MB of the actual app. Very useful if you want to download an app update but don’t have access to Wi-Fi where you currently are and don’t want to use up a lot of your data plan. Let us know if you have received the Smart Apps Update feature in the Google Play store yet and what you think of it in the comments section below.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Google Play Store app updated to v3.5.15, Google Play Store app updated,

Google brings incremental app updates, added encryption measures to Android

Google has just announced a new feature for Google Play that’s sure to please anyone who’s sat through an app update that never seemed to end. It now offers what it calls “Smart App Updates,” which will let developers provide incremental updates to apps instead of forcing people to download a whole new APK for every minor update. On average, Google says those should be about a third the size of typical updates. What’s more, the company has also announced that it’s bringing added encryption measures to Android, which will let paid apps be encrypted with a device-specific key that makes them harder to rip and share. Both features will be supported on Android devices running Gingerbread or above.

Check out our full coverage of Google I/O 2012’s opening keynote at our event hub!

Google brings incremental app updates, added encryption measures to Android originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jun 2012 13:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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