[inversionOf]

Google announced smart updates and then enabled it (they had already been using this for Nexus system updates). There is absolutely nothing any developer or user has to do, so there is no documentation on it because none is needed. If you actually monitor the connection during a smart/delta update, while the UI shows the full size of the APK it actually downloads 1/4 or less of that.

It is absolutely enabled. It is absolutely working. There is no conspiracy about this. It is one of the reasons most updates take hours to propagate.

You complained about managing thin binaries, so I don't see how the developer managing that would improve anything, not to mention that it adds difficulties to cryptographic signing and verification.

[iainmerrick]

Google announced smart updates and then enabled it. There is absolutely nothing any developer or user has to do, so there is no documentation on it because none is needed.

OK, that's good news! I stand corrected.

It would still be great for expansion files to get the same treatment, or better yet to abolish expansion files and just allow big APKs.

I'm a little sceptical that absolutely no documentation or feedback is needed. Surely there are things that I as an app developer could be doing to make the deltas smaller.

You complained about managing thin binaries

To clarify, as an Android developer you can manage thin binaries yourself, as a way to reduce the download size; it's just a hassle. My complaint is really that the Play Store should do that app thinning automatically.

[inversionOf]

Updates to Xcode added what Android's tools have had for years, which is the notion of generating multiple binaries for different devices/profiles. Xcode then signs those independent sections and packages them together in an archive, while Google has you send them up separately, each signed separately.

Apple sort of presented it like the App Store is picking and choosing, but it's the enhancements to Xcode that actually enable the functionality. Google could add some tooling improvements to make it slightly easier, but really they've already done all of the hard parts.

Expansion files were a hack, and remain a hack. They are necessary for large games obviously, but really 100MB encompasses the enormous bulk of apps with ease. It would be ideal if Google simply abolished expansion files and folded the sizing into normal APKs.