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Improvements for smaller app downloads on Google Play

Posted by Anthony Morris, SWE Google Play

Google Play continues to grow rapidly, as Android users installed over 65 billion apps in the last year from the Google Play Store. We’re also seeing developers move to update their apps more frequently to push great new content, patch security vulnerabilities, and iterate quickly on user feedback.

However, many users are sensitive to the amount of data they use, especially if they are not on Wi-Fi. Google Play is investing in improvements to reduce the data that needs to be transferred for app installs and updates, while making data cost more transparent to users.

Read on to understand the updates and learn some tips for ways to optimize the size of your APK.

New Delta algorithm to reduce the size of app updates

For approximately 98% of app updates from the Play Store, only changes (deltas) to APK files are downloaded and merged with the existing files, reducing the size of updates. We recently rolled out a delta algorithm, bsdiff, that further reduces patches by up to 50% or more compared to the previous algorithm. Bsdiff is specifically targeted to produce more efficient deltas of native libraries by taking advantage of the specific ways in which compiled native code changes between versions. To be most effective, native libraries should be stored uncompressed (compression interferes with delta algorithms).

An example from Chrome:

Patch Description	Previous patch size	Bsdiff Size
M46 to M47 major update	22.8 MB	12.9 MB
M47 minor update	15.3 MB	3.6 MB

Apps that don’t have uncompressed native libraries can see a 5% decrease in size on average, compared to the previous delta algorithm.

Applying the delta algorithm to APK Expansion Files to further reduce update size

APK Expansion Files allow you to include additional large files up to 2GB in size (e.g. high resolution graphics or media files) with your app, which is especially popular with games. We have recently expanded our delta and compression algorithms to apply to these APK Expansion Files in addition to APKs, reducing the download size of initial installs by 12%, and updates by 65% on average.

Clearer size information in the Play Store

Alongside the improvements to reduce download size, we also made information displayed about data used and download sizes in the Play Store clearer. You can now see actual download sizes, not the APK file size, in the Play Store. If you already have an app, you will only see the update size. These changes are rolling out now.

Example 1: Showing new “Download size” of APK

Example 2: Showing new “Update size” of APK

Tips to reduce your download sizes

1. Optimize for the right size measurements: Users care about download size (i.e. how many bytes are transferred when installing/updating an app), and they care about disk size (i.e. how much space the app takes up on disk). It’s important to note that neither of these are the same as the original APK file size nor necessarily correlated.

Chrome example:

	Compressed Native Library	Uncompressed Native Library
APK Size	39MB	52MB (+25%)
Download size (install)	29MB	29MB (no change)
Download size (update)	29MB	21MB (-29%)
Disk size	71MB	52MB (-26%)

Chrome found that initial download size remained the same by not compressing the native library in their APK, while the APK size increased, because Google Play already performs compression for downloads. They also found that the update size decreased, as deltas are more effective with uncompressed files, and disk size decreased as you no longer need an compressed copy of the native library:

2. Reduce your APK size: Remove unnecessary data from the APK like unused resources and code.

3. Optimize parts of your APK to make them smaller: Using more efficient file formats, for example by using WebP instead of JPEG, or by using Proguard to remove unused code.

Read more about reducing APK sizes and watch the I/O 2016 session ‘Putting Your App on a Diet’ to learn from Wojtek Kalici?ski, about how to reduce the size of your APK.

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Action Launcher 3 updated with Marshmallow based launcher improvements Google Now integration root and more

An update to Action Launcher 3 is currently rolling out with the usual assortment of improvements, feature tweaks, and fixes... but theres more going on here. This isnt just any update—the latest version of Action Launcher 3 moves to a Marshmallow launcher code base and adds (root-only) Google Now integration.

Heres the full changelog.

Action Launcher 3 updated with Marshmallow-based launcher improvements, Google Now integration (root), and more was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

from Android Police – Android News, Apps, Games, Phones, Tablets http://ift.tt/2ag93bT
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Improvements to Sign In with Google Play services 8 3

Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

With Google Play services 8.3, we’ve been hard at work to provide a greatly improved sign-in experience for developers that want to build apps that sign their users in with Google. To help you better understand some of these changes, this is the first in a series of blog posts about what’s available to you as a developer. In this post, we’ll discuss the changes to the user experience, and how you can use them in your app, as well as updates to the API to make coding Sign-In with Google more straightforward. On Android Marshmallow, this new Sign-In API has removed any requirement for device permissions, so there is no need to request runtime access to the accounts on the device, as was the case with the old API.

User Experience Improvements

We’ve gotten lots of feedback from developers about the user experience of using Google’s social sign-in button. Many of you noted that it took too many steps and was confusing for users. Typically, the experience is that the user touches a sign in button, and they are asked to choose an account. If that account doesn’t have a Google+ profile, they need to create one, and after that they have to give permissions based on the type of information that the app is asking for. Finally, they get to sign in to the app.

With the new API, the default set of permissions that the app requests has been reduced to basic profile information and optionally email address as demonstrated here. This introduces opportunities for much streamlined user experience: the first improvement here is in the presentation of the button itself. We had received feedback that the Google+ branding on the Sign-In button made it feel like the user would need to share Google+ data, which most apps don’t use. As such, the SignInButton has been rebranded with the reduced scopes -- it now reads ‘Sign In with Google’, and follows the standard Google branding for use with basic profile information.

After this, the user flow is also more straightforward. Instead of subsequent screens where a Google account is picked based on the email addresses registered on the device, followed by a potential ‘Create Google+ Profile’ dialog, followed by a permissions consent dialog, like this:

The user experience has changed to a single step, where the user chooses their account and gives consent. If they don’t have a Google+ profile, they don’t need to create one, eliminating that step. Additional consent dialogs come later, and are best requested in context so that the user understand why you might ask for access to their calendar or contact, and they are only prompted at the time that this data is needed.

We hope that a streamlined, one-tap, non-social sign-in option with additional OAuth permissions requested in context will help improve your sign-in rates and make it a breeze to sign-in with Google.

Check out some live apps that use the new API, including Instacart, NPR One, and Bring!

In the next post we’ll build on this by looking at some of the changes in the API to make coding apps that use Sign-In with Google even easier.

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