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Google ups max Android app size to 4GB

Capacity to play with

Google has increased the capacity of its Android app packaging tech, giving developers up to 4GB in which to cram their smartphone and tablet software and associated resources.

The previous limit was 50MB, but with quad-core chippery and ultra-high resolution screens the next big things, adding app package capacity was a necessity.

"Today, we’re expanding the Android app size limit to 4GB,” read an announcement on the Android Developers' blog.

“Android applications have historically been limited to a maximum size of 50MB… This works for most apps, and smaller is usually better — every megabyte you add makes it harder for your users to download and get started. However, some types of apps, like high-quality 3D interactive games, require more local resources.”

Every app can now have two expansion files, each up to 2GB in size and built on the still capped .APK file. ®

About time.

Now you can possibly try out those large games, and see if they really are crap - and still get a refund.

Now all Google need to do is remove that ridiculous 15min time limit for refunds, and things may be looking up.

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Games. Plenty of them download enormous amounts of data - over a GByte for quite a few I've installed in Android. As the quality gets closer to the PC versions that's going to go up, I'm regularly downloading 8GB installers on Steam/Amazon etc.

More commonly games pulling just 50MB can now use google instead of running there own servers. 50MB barely covers the soundtrack for many games.

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Data files, e.g. offline maps.

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There wouldn't be much point splitting it into separate apk and data files if they end up in the same place! The current way they download then split the apk into sdcard and internal chunks isn't scalable to these sort of sizes, not enough temp space and far too much work needed to encrypt that much data at install time.

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Anonymous Coward

Does this mean large applications will now take up a lot of space on the limited app partition (/data, e.g. only 2GB on the SGS2) or will it automatically put the expansion files into the large /sdcard area?

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