Google Raised Android Market App Size Limit From 50MB to a Whooping 4GB | Hacker News Reader

Google Raised Android Market App Size Limit From 50MB to a Whooping 4GB

techieapps.com

50 pointswebsagir26 comments

The availability of highly resourceful and rocking apps at our disposal, has actually revolutionized the world of technology.

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That is awesome. The experience of download a high quality game on Android Market and then have to download the data (usually quite big) from the game company server (that can be slow/unavailable/unstable) is frustrating. Be able to download it from Google itself and the possibility to pause/resume is great.

Official announcement: http://android-developers.blogspot.in/2012/03/android-apps-b...

That is a bit sad. In most every case applications can easily shrink in size. On my ipad the other day I noticed I had several games (little more than flash junk, not massive 3d assets) that were 300+MB in size with one at 600MB. When your silly game is using almost 1/10 of the space on my device something is wrong. Compare this to Google books which is 3MB! Props to that group for doing it right. Large downloads can mean download errors, users can cancel the download, users that forget about the app and never run it... And even 50MB assumes that they have a reasonable connection, imaging most of the world that doesn't have 3G trying to download several GB. Maybe their shouldn't be a limit, but apps should be some sort of incentive system (rewarded for small downloads and penalized otherwise?)

Edit: with 4GB I could release apps that include my backups...

Apples and oranges. Apps like e-readers are mostly code and have only a few images assets for icons, logos, etc. A game has a large code base, but it also can have tons and tons of image assets for textures, as well as video and audio assets. While obviously you don't have to have all of that for a great game, I don't think you can say that just because such an app is large it could easily be smaller without impacting the quality of the final experience. Look at Battlefield 3 on the consoles, where they had to use two DVDs because the texture files wouldn't fit.

I would understand if Battlefield3 used up a lot of space, but when apps similar to the complexity of bejeweled are using hundreds of MB clearly the developer is just being lazy. Most apps/games on my ipad seem to be around 20MB so when there are a few that are 20 times larger they quickly get deleted.

As for Google books, they clearly took the time and effort to make their download small. Even "hello world" flashlight type apps on my ipad are bigger in size. And saying their app doesn't do much as the reason is also silly (ibooks in comparison is 50MB). I single them out as they definitely did take the extra little bit of time to make their package small.

Go into itunes and view your apps by size. You might be surprised what is small and what is big.

What did you mean by "flash junk"? Are you talking about games you downloaded from the App Store?

I guess he means not more complex than typical Flash games. And even they're kind of bloated.

Yup, the type of simple 2D puzzle games that you find on flash game websites.

This changes nothing. App developers that needed more than 50mb would just download assets after they downloaded the app. So a small app download (1-2 megs) and then another 500mb of assets. Usually only games did this.

This really doesn't make much of a difference outside of the fact that the download now comes from Google's servers which are much faster than the game companies servers.

Also, this is probably to accommodate the crazy 3d games that nvidia is pushing.

Awesome, I can fit four of these on my galaxy nexus.

Hard to have sympathy when there's a version with double that capacity available and you passed on it.

Actually there isn´t. The 32 gb model never was released and was recently canceled. http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/15/32gb-gsm-galaxy-nexus-can...

*Whopping

Exactly.

PREDICTION: Google is prepairing for Online Learning Videos being added to the app store.

The only thing that comes to mind is that they're prepairing for an onslaught of media like Movies (which is the only thing that would take up that much space).

many 3D games already take that much space.

The new limit means that instead of installing large resource files that need to be hosted on your own infrastructure and downloaded through your own code, you can now have Google host these files for you.

This also improves the user experience, because there is no second tier install process and the users sees the correct space requirements on the market page.

Also I've seen many people complain that because of this two-step install, you can't use the 15 minutes window to decide you don't like the app.

Is it only a 15 minute window where people can call and ask for a refund? I've been wondering that. I see ~10-30% of my android app's purchases then cancelled.

Yes, 15 minutes: http://support.google.com/androidmarket/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

The android market also auto-cancels your purchase if you are unable to download the app after a set period of time. I found this out when I bricked my kindle fire after trying to get the marketplace to work(it would allow the purchase, but couldn't download the new app).

This change would probably help fix issues where the user can't download the content, but could download the app through the market.

Actually Andy promised to fix the problem that forced games to be downloaded in two stages. It was in an interview on The Verge. If I can find it I'll post it.

That's exactly what they're doing, only the emphasis is more on Google TV related offerings. Also consider their Google Fiber subsidiary's 1000-acre antenna farm in Iowa and you start seeing the future of TV channels...or should I say TV apps?

But if it's online learning you wouldn't have to bake the videos into the app - they'd be online. Otherwise one is basically pitching offline YouTube access.

Prediction - they are preparing for PS3 quality games on the mobile.

The TomTom GPS app on my iPhone takes up several GB

This really sucks if you have an old phone on a crappy connection.

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