I’m afraid this isn’t really going to be horribly effective. There are bottlenecks in the network stack and there are bottlenecks in the process of writing to the internal storage.
Maybe if one of the apps was hosted on crappy storage somewhere… Even at 1:00 at a time and choose through some fairly decent amounts of CPU.
But, it is efficient. If I download 2 or 3 large apps they get downloaded simultaneously and the lowest size app gets installed 1st. Meanwhile, previously it had to wait until one app was downloaded then wait to install them one by one. Which would be as much as 3 times slow.
Your mobile processor can handle a couple of threads of download per core. If you’re downloading from multiple locations and aren’t throttled and have a phone with many cores, it can go faster. Realistically, to min/max, the software should know what your max configuration is and push that per download. Once a download fails to achieve the max, then it allows other downloads to bypass the queue. For large files, it’s almost always more efficient to focus on less streams if the streams can provide you the throughput.
It takes ages updating apps one by one. Your smartphone is capable enough to download and update multiple apps simultaneously speeding the install process significantly.
Edit: just downloads for now and hopefully updates in the future
Modern phones do a thing called “race to sleep”. If they’re awake every other background process also runs, so it’s beneficial to do the task as quickly as possible then go back to sleep.
So hopefully this is available for new device installs too. I dread factory resetting or replacing devices because it takes hours to download apps upon a fresh setup. If they could all just download more than one at a time I might actually factory rest and get rid of my annoying lock screen bug.
I don't get the hype over this. How often do you find your day interrupted by Play Store downloads that one finds this to be an important upgrade? My apps generally update while I'm asleep, I pretty much never need to wait for them.
Ahh yeah, that's a good point, I forgot about the recovery process. In that case, yeah I can absolutely see this saving a bunch of time when transferring devices.
It actually does with the default setting, but it doesn’t show individual progress bars, making it harder to notice. You basically have the “updating repositories…” bar on the very top, and then one after another the apps get the green “update” button. At this point however the updates have already been downloaded, and the button starts the installation of the update locally.
Well, I’m on the newest version, and I don’t see that. When I have multiple updates, it downloads the one, and since I’m on Android 13, it installs it, then it downloads the next one, and installs that one, and so on and so forth.
Alright, alright, y’all need to cut some slack for this small startup. Joe the intern had to rush this one over night with nothing but Notepad and Filezilla.
Personally I don’t actually remember this, I do remember waiting for each individual app to download and install, and slowly watching the progress bar in the notification area, waiting for a new game to download on my Android 4.3 tablet. Ah, memories.
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