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Comment by haribilalic | Hacker News Reader

We are also increasing the maximum size for .apk files on Market to 50MB, to better support richer games.

They should increase this. There are some amazing games on the iPhone that are well above 50 MB. RAGE HD is 743.6 MB (but its an iPad app too) and Myst is 533.4 MB.

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The Gameloft game Dragon Hunter(Which isn't on the Android Market) comes with a 5mb .apk. Then once the app installs it connects to the internet to download the rest of the 240mb of files. That seems like the best way to work around the limit.

That work-around comes at a cost of the server bandwidth tho. You'll have to maintain a server with the game resources. It's one time cost (or probably 2-3 times if the user uninstalls and re-installs again a few times).

But your idea is actually cool if your app needs a lot of screen specific resources. They can be downloaded later after checking the device screen specs.

On the bright side, its a bit easier on the device itself, as the package manager needs to copy the APK from the download location when installing, so by storing application resources outside of the APK, installs will be faster and less likely to fail.

It is also much more flexible. Aura (GPS navigation) downloads maps only of those states or countries, that you are interested in. You don't have to store all maps.

That's why the possibility for those games to download and install their content on the SD card exists.

Android phones unlike the iPhone don't all have a huge internal memory but when it's not the case it can be extended with sd cards.

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