Have you ever tried downloading a big game from the Google Play Store? Normally a game like Real Boxing will download with additional data. This is because the application is way beyond the Play Store set limit of 50 megabytes so the developer has to make sure he sticks with that by separating the application itself and the required assets are hosted separately. Google calls the extra allowance expansion files and allows developers up to two expansion files with capacity capped at 4 GB (2 GB each).
Going forward, there will be no need for expansion files for applications that don’t exceed 100 megabytes which is the new limit set by Google.
The move is meant to bolster the quality of applications being developed for Google’s mobile platform even though the company encourages developers to keep things light as bigger applications impact performance on certain devices and thus resulting in undesired user experiences. There’s also the issue of mobile data bundles and speeds. How long will it take to download a 100 MB application from the Play Store using mobile data where you are? What’s your data plan? Will you run out of data bundles while downloading such apps? Developers have to factor all that in before taking advantage of these new changes.
With time, devices on the Android platform have gotten faster and more powerful thanks to advancements in processor technology and while devices would normally strain under the load of graphics intensive games 3 years ago, it is no longer the case on most upper midrange and high-end devices. The only issue here may be storage. While we have seen devices with a lot of flash storage (case in point: the Asus Zenfone 2 Deluxe Special Edition which has 256 GB internal storage), more and more devices are ditching expandable memory in favour of the fast flash memory. That is mostly limited to 16, 32 or 64 GB with even lesser space being user-accessible. There are some with 128 GB internal storage but they are prohibitively expensive.
With the new app limits, developers will of course swing into action and take advantage but it is up to you to be wise. You may just run out of your meagre 8 gigabytes of internal storage if you install as few as 30 apps that take advantage of the recent changes.
