Google ups max Android app size to 4GB

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 …

[Scott 2]

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: About time BUT

It will still need to fit somewhere on your phone.

[Lee Dowling]

Cue the calls of "My child only downloaded one app that cost £0.50p while I was on holiday and now I have a £2000.00 bill!"

[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?

[Paul Shirley]

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

so Metavisor the world

Famous Apple fanbois getting his penny worth, sadly he is right so I will have to upvote him

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: so Metavisor the world

Thanks for the compliment, but I'm not world famous, haven't even been mentioned in El Reg's articles, unlike Barry Shitpeas - a true international man of Google.

As for right or wrong the answer is neither, it was a question. Actually a dumb one since the blog post linked from the article explained that Google provides a loader that downloads the extended data into the shared storage (aka /sdcard) and not the precious /data area.

Actually the whole thing is not that different from what apps do today, the difference is Google now offers to host the data.

[Chris Woollard]

This scares me.

What possible reason would you want an single app to be 4Gb in size?

The only thing I now think is...

... Severe Bloatware! What other option is there

[TRT]

Data files, e.g. offline maps.

[Paul Shirley]

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.

[Shady]

Does this mean...

...I can finally get Office on Android?

[Anonymous Coward]

apk is a zip

apk files are renamed zip files, capped at 2Gb internal content size for legacy reasons (32-bit addressing)

that's why anything larger would need splitting