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Google Further Shrinks the Size of Android App Updates (engadget.com) 50

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.
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Google Further Shrinks the Size of Android App Updates

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  • by JoeMerchant ( 803320 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2016 @11:46AM (#53440595)

    Get smaller patch sizes by compressing the things that people actually change... didn't git do something like this?

  • by jeffb (2.718) ( 1189693 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2016 @11:47AM (#53440607)

    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...

    • diff, rsync, git, et.al. are NIH, can't use them without compromising security of the user lock-in.

    • I imagine that a lot of the stuff that's changed such as images and sounds doesn't really work well with diff anyway.

      • by unrtst ( 777550 )

        I imagine that a lot of the stuff that's changed such as images and sounds doesn't really work well with diff anyway.

        See the rsync protocol, which can be used by things other than rsync. For example, BackupPC uses it to transfer only the parts of files that have changed, which includes binary files.

        • by tepples ( 727027 )

          Lossless compression, such as PKZIP for Microsoft Office and LibreOffice documents, FLAC for audio, and PNG for images, makes it less trivial in the general case to find "only the parts of files that have changed". A protocol like rsync would need to have specific support for each archive container and lossless codec in order to identify said "parts". This story is about Google Play Store gaining such support for APK files, which use the PKZIP container.

          • by unrtst ( 777550 )

            They are unzipping the apk first. It's right in the summary. So the GP I replied to was referring to the files within the apk, and said, "a lot of the stuff that's changed such as images and sounds doesn't really work well with diff anyway". This has nothing to do with the lossless compression you mentioned (which, though I doubt they're doing this, could be diff'd very well with a slightly smarter diff, as they are lossless, so they can be decompressed first, then diff'd, and the diff can be sent and appli

            • by mlyle ( 148697 )

              His comment was "only the parts of [image, audio] files that changed. It seems you are agreeing with him.

      • I would argue that you don't need to worry about diff for images and sounds, because an image/sound is either wholly replaced or not changing release to release. Those would simply not be sent for most updates if not changed. The remaining content could benefit from diffs.

    • Another way would be to install fewer shitty apps in the first place. I reckon half of of my phone's storage is taken up by stuff that I don't use. I don't even know what some of it even is.

  • People still have limited data plans, where this really matters to the end-user?

    Why?

    • Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)

      by godrik ( 1287354 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2016 @12:02PM (#53440709)

      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.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      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.

  • 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' hotspo

  • But if the OEMs don't bother patching, who cares how small the patches are? Google needs to address the elephant in the room - how can google, ummmm, encourage its OEMs to patch Android systems?
  • by Anonymous Coward

    What a novel concept nobody has ever implemented before. Certainly worthy of patent protection.

  • 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.
  • 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.

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