Read more.APK files remain at 50MB, however.
Read more.APK files remain at 50MB, however.
Automatically is not a good idea in my book - would much prefer that there was some way to insist that these kind of megadownloads only happen over WiFi. Or at least some message to the user like "I'm just about to download a large expansion file. Would you prefer I wait until you're on WiFi? Y/N"Whilst the 'APK' application files themselves will remain limited to 50MB, developers can now bundle two additional 2GB expansion files with their applications, typically to be downloaded automatically from the market.
I've only got a 1GB data limit, so don't fancy forking over £300+ for the other 3GB of "out of plan" data if I tried to get a mega-sized app.
Not that I think that anyone's going to do something Office 2010 sized just yet awhile...![]()
Shame that I can only use about 100MB of my onboard memory for apps then. Stupid HTC Desire. In real terms that means I can fit Flash, Skype, Maps and a handful of other applications before it cries that there's no room left.
Apart from office suites or perhaps a version of Adobe Creative Suite for tablets, (although even there I've got major doubts that they'll get to that kind of size), the only thing I can think that would approach that is if this "tablet gaming" really starts to take off for serious games (Angry Birds clones don't count). So I'm thinking that a tablet version of Deus Ex, Assassin's Creed or Fable 2 (for example) might start to approach the post 1GB size.
However, here's another objection - those kind of titles definitely won't be Android exclusives, so whatever get's delivered will have to be fitted into the constraints of the iPad2/3 (who, I assume, have smaller limits on downloads - although I'm quite content to be told I'm wrong). Note - I've assumed that phones won't really suit the mega-apps, (due to screen size), so they're more or less reserved for tablets. Although where thinks like the Galaxy Note fit in is a point of debate.
EDIT: and finally here's another argument against these kinds of large (potential?) apps - I would have thought that having an app that occupies between 10-25% of the total storage on your fancy tablet (or phone) is a big turn-off for most people - given that most devices seem to have storage in the range 16-32GB.
I was thinking more about MS Flight simulator which holds 3d maps and textures of many countries. Even though its just images, this thing takes up space.
On a second thought, they could download it online as the plane go kind of like in Google earth.
Personally I doubt many (if any) developers will create apps that need an additional 4GB of data.
It seems to me Google figured that if they are going to re-engineer the way apps are stored in the marketplace and delivered to users, they may as well do it so they didn't need to keep changing things moving forward.
I have no idea if Google have done this, but if I had put this system together, I would have included the ability for devs to have two sets of additional data that the install mechanism could choose between. So you could have, for example, a 300MB data file and a 500MB one. Ony one is downloaded depending on your device or version of Android etc.
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