Posted by
Dynamic Delivery with App Bundle Produces Optimized APKs
Apps have seen great success with app bundles, but games often have different delivery challenges.
Today, large Android games rely on APK Expansion Files and custom Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to deliver content. APK Expansion Files, also known as OBBs, support large resources but require you to maintain an additional publishing artifact, which causes many developer issues. Using CDNs for resource delivery often results in a suboptimal user-experience; users install and open the game just to face a long progress bar as they wait for additional resources to be downloaded. Users may also have to wait for updated resources, rather than having them delivered as part of the game auto-update. Finally, CDNs usually aren’t free, so this way of delivering game assets also involves extra cost that needs to be accounted for.
To handle the unique needs of games, Play is introducing Play Asset Delivery, giving you dynamic delivery of the right game assets to the right devices at the right time at no additional cost. To achieve this, we extended the Android App Bundle publishing format by adding asset packs.
.
Play Asset Delivery engine support
- Version 4.25 of Unreal engine supports building App Bundles with asset packs instead of APK expansion files and that takes care of packaging your Unity Asset Bundles into asset packs and lets you build an Android App Bundle that includes them. The plugin is now available in our Package Registry and is compatible with Unity 2017.4 and higher.
- For other engines, Gradle 4.0 lets you combine your asset packs and your binary into an App Bundle. Just update your gradle version and configure the delivery mode in the build.gradle file for each individual asset pack.
Customizing when asset packs are installed
You can customize when asset packs are installed according to three delivery modes: install-time, fast-follow, and on-demand.
install-timeasset packs allow you to deliver up to 1GB of game assets as part of the initial game installation. To your app, this works like a large APK, with no need for expansion files or special API calls. Just package your assets in asset packs and publish to Play.
fast-followasset packs are automatically downloaded as soon as the app is installed, allowing the user to start playing while important assets are still downloading. The app doesn't have to be opened for the download to start.
on-demandasset packs are downloaded upon request by the app.
Both on-demand and fast-follow assets are delivered as raw files and placed in your game’s internal storage. You can track download progress with the
Asphalt 8 by Gameloft
, . Asphalt Xtreme was easy to switch from using APK expansion files to using PAD with install-time delivery. Asphalt 8 and Minion Rush both originally used a custom CDN, which Gameloft replaced with PAD. They were able to leverage fast-follow and on-demand delivery by replacing their custom CDN calls with calls to the PAD API. They saw the expected reduction in CDN costs, but with .
Improved user experience with cost savings
by RV AppStudios
US-based developer , they saw a 4.7% increase in 15-day retention and 21% reduction in crashes & ANRs. Overall, these changes helped improve the user experience by offering more stable, transparent, and secure downloads, while also saving costs for RV AppStudios. that will walk you through the integration process depending on the game engine you use.
SOCIAL SHARE CARD GENERATOR