Google are changing the way you download huge apps

The Android Market can be a little annoying at times. Especially with the 15 minute refund window. Let me set the scene and you will no doubt have been there and have been equally annoyed.

You want to play a game on your phone, you don’t want adverts, you want something good and immersive, maybe a driving game. So you set about the Android Market to find a new driving game. “Ooh Reckless Racing 2 that looks fun”, “no doubt that will provide me with many hours entertainment”, so you pay for the new app, it quickly installs and all is well. Now for the fun bit, you tap on the new icon in your app draw and bham “we need to download extra data for this game”, grrr, so of it goes to download the extra data, stopping first to complain you haven’t got wifi enabled, grrr, you turn wifi on and it continues to download the data.

By this stage I am usually starting to get annoyed, any excitement surrounding the new game has gone, any thoughts of keeping an eye on the clock to see if I’m still within the 15 minute refund window have also gone. Eventually the extra data downloads and you can play your game, only the game doesn’t work very well with your HTC Hero or Wildfire so you quickly get out of it and head back to the market to hit that elusive “Refund” button, it’s gone, you spent so long downloading data that the refund window has long gone. By this stage I am usually crying and smashing my phone against the wall. No doubt you all have a similar reaction.

Well Google have took steps to deal with this problem. First of all they are upping the size limit of the apps to 4GB. It was 50MB which meant anything over that and the app would have to download extra as explained earlier. Well now the Android Market will host this extra data, so the Android Market will now when you finally manage to fully install the whole app. So you will actually get 15 minutes to test the app out and see if it is for you.

This will no doubt make downloading games and large app a lot less stressful in my household. It may save me a few pounds as well.

Source – Android Developer Blogspot

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    • James Pearce
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    • James Pearce
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