How long have you been waiting for an app to install? Yes, downloading it from the Android application store depends on your Internet connection… and we can say that the installation depends on the capacity of each smartphone determined by its performance, but even so in the high-end models, it feels slow.
It is a fact that we have gone from having a few megabytes of storage on our smartphones to having access to several TB. That is why the applications seem to grow in terms of size since space is now not a limitation in most cases. Google’s new goal is to make Android app installs faster.
Android applications will install faster thanks to the new implementation that Google is working on
Google has tried to combat this with what is known as App Bundles, a system that allows developers to create multiple versions of their applications for different device configurations: Google Play downloads the appropriate APK for each phone.
Now Google wants to go a step further with “Optimizing Application Installation”, which will study which part of an application is used when it is initially opened and will use that data to improve the process of updating and launching the application. It certainly sounds pretty good.
For now, this novelty is in the development phase, so it has not been implemented in the Android application store. However, the English medium 9to5Google has had access to a support document for the function, so we know a few more details. In fact, it is a public document, for now only available in English.
When an app is first opened, Google will monitor which parts of the app it uses and which parts it doesn’t. When you download Instagram for the first time, for example, you can spend the first ten minutes setting up your profile and looking for new friends. If this is the case for a significant number of users, Google Play will download that part of the app first, leaving the publishing tools or story viewer uninstalled until the user tries to use them or the process runs in the background.
This opens up a large number of possibilities since the application can be fragmented according to the use of each user. For example, load only the RAM resources necessary for correct operation, leaving that space free of functions that are not intended to be used. Thanks to this implementation, the load on the processor and the amount of RAM required could be reduced.
And of course, all this data collection will be in compliance with Google’s existing privacy policy, so no personal information of the user will be used outside of the application in question. All the content that is uploaded to the application will not be tracked, so all this will be left out of the analysis, maintaining the security and privacy of the user.
As this is a new role, the Big G company will allow you to opt-out of the process. You will simply have to disable the functionality from the Google Play settings, something simple. However, you should know that disabling this feature will only disable the analysis of its use, so you will still benefit from the faster load times that result from the processing of everyone else’s data.
We hope that soon this feature will reach the application store and with the help of thousands of users with their downloads it can contribute to a faster installation, as well as a saving of device resources in the long term. This will leave room for developers to make more complex applications.