From May 2023, Google TV and Android TV platforms will be required to use Android App Bundles. Smart TVs come with less amount of storage than smartphones do. The majority of them only come with 8GB or less of free storage, which is hardly enough to install a few Play Store apps and games.
In 2018, Google released App Bundles, which let developers divide their products into smaller parts. As a result, the download size was decreased by sending only the updated portion to phones via the Play Store. Google mandated that all newly published Android apps on the Play Store must support App Bundles three years later, in August 2021. From May 2023, Google TV and Android TV platforms will be required to use Android App Bundles.
Smart TVs come with less amount of storage than smartphones do. The majority of them only come with 8GB or less of free storage, which is hardly enough to install a few Play Store apps and games. Additionally, the remaining free space will quickly be filled over time, resulting in a poor user experience and performance problems. By converting its smart TV platform to Android App Bundles, Google hopes to address this issue.
According to the business, App Bundles reduce an app’s size by 20% on average. Additionally, you can reclaim up to 60% of an app’s storage with the use of app archiving support. This will also lessen the likelihood that consumers may remove an app because of a lack of storage. On smartphones, app archiving is an option that may be customized; however, Google is requiring support for it on TVs.
Google estimates that it will only take around three days for developers to convert their Android TV software to the App Bundle format, but they have roughly six months to do it. Apps that don’t adopt the new format by the specified date of May 2023 will be removed by the firm “from the TV surface.”
Starting May 2023, Google Play will require that apps built for Android TV and Google TV be uploaded as Android App Bundles (AAB) with app archiving support enabled. This is great news since TVs often have far less storage than smartphones/tablets. pic.twitter.com/hiCA2LCgbe
— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) November 21, 2022
Owners of Chromecast with Google TV will benefit from the change, in addition to smart TVs powered by Android. Less than half of the meager 8GB storage space on the streaming stick is accessible to consumers, making for an unpleasant experience. In order to free up some space on the dongle, Google released an upgrade in December 2021 that made it simpler to remove unused programs and cleaned up the file system. This is merely another move made by the firm to get past the storage limitations of its dongle.
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