How does the Google's smart updates technology work?

Question

I know the basics: they compute a difference between two versions and send it to the user's device where it is deployed. Precisely, I am interested in 2 questions:

What changes were made to the server's software and what changes were made to the Android Google Play Store application?
What algorithm is used to compute difference between the two application's versions?

Thank you.

Not sure if google followed any of these approaches, but it is similar to [FOTA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOTA_(technology)) — nandeesh, Sep 04 '12 at 03:06
What approaches do you mean exactly? They definitely use delta encoding to compute the difference between two files. — Nikolai Samteladze, Sep 04 '12 at 03:59
I highly doubt that Google is interested in disclosing these details. — CommonsWare, Sep 20 '12 at 12:45
Probably you are right, but they use Courgette to update Chrome and it is available online (source code + brief documentation). — Nikolai Samteladze, Sep 20 '12 at 17:59

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 25 '12 at 02:30

3

OK, it seems that they use GDIFF algorithm that computes differences between streams. More information about GDIFF algorithm and GDIFF format here: http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-gdiff-19970901, http://gdiff.codeplex.com/.

answered Sep 25 '12 at 02:30

Nikolai Samteladze

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How does the Google's smart updates technology work?

1 Answers1