Newsletter
A new version of the Google Play Store rolled out earlier this week, bringing the store up to version 6.7. Now the APK has been torn down to see what we may be seeing in a future update to the Google Play Store, and there are some pretty nifty new features coming to Google Play, or at least features that the Google Play team are testing. Some of this stuff we may see announced or at least talked about at Google I/O this week.
If you’ve ever loaded up the Google Play Store on a connection that’s fairly slow, then you are going to love this feature here. There appears to be a string of code in this APK that points to the ability for the Play Store to preload up to 20MB of data on WiFi. That may not sound like a lot, but if you’re running on a connection that is around 5Mbps or slower, that can definitely help speed things up. The string of code in this update is referred to as “lite mode”, it’s not yet live, but it should be in the next update or two.
This next feature is a bit puzzling. You see there is a string of code in the APK about Android Wear, stating “Checking for updates for your Android Wear Device”. It’s odd because firmware updates are done through the Android Wear companion app. Additionally, Google Play checks for updates for all apps, not just those that are Android Wear apps. A user has also come across a notification in Google Play v6.7 with that same text – which is shown in the screenshot below. It’s a bit of a weird string of code to see in Google Play. We will probably never know what it is for until the feature is actually rolled out in a future update to the Google Play Store. We may also see some Android Wear updates coming soon. Who knows.
There’s nothing much left in the APK that’s new this time around. We’ll likely see another update to the Google Play Store this week, with the Google I/O keynote happening tomorrow in Mountain View.
