Android Market Updates on LARGE Applications (50mb+)

In the future, I will be porting an iPhone app to Android/NDK which works with large amounts of resource files (over 50 megs). Will my app have to download and store these files on /sdcard, and check for/download updates in a proprietar开发者_如何学Pythony way over my own web hosting, or will google have a solution for this? Can google actually host extra files?

Most apps download resources on their own to the sd-card because apps usually reside in the data directory which is on some phones not very large (e.g. ~140MB free on a fresh HTC Desire). A good example is MapDroyd which downloads and updates the map data itself via http independently of the market.

Since Android 2.2 (Froyo) you can install an app to sd-card but not onto the plain sd-card but into a special encrypted part of the sd-card.

If you really wont to use the Android Market for everything you could split your app into two or more apps - one for the main app and one for the resources. Apps that are signed with the same developer key can access each other. If the main app starts check for the resources app and if not present open the Android market displaying the resource app for download.

Alternatively the Google Play Store (formerly known as Android Market), now also allows to host large APK Expansion Files ("resource" files) up to 2GB.

See more info about this here: APK Extension files on Google Play