According to Google’s recent post on its developer page, this new ability will let eager players boot up a game “within seconds” after downloading a decent percentage of its files. This way, you’re able to play it while the rest of the game’s content is currently downloading in the background. The company claims that early testing of this feature saw games ready to launch “at least” twice as quickly. While new to the mobile scene, such approaches have already been implemented on both PC and console games. For instance, the first Star Wars: Battlefront by EA allowed gamers to strike down helpless Rebel soldiers as Darth Vader while waiting for the rest of the game to finish its download. Of course, this also means that players are locked away from enjoying Battlefront’s core content until the process is done, but at least they get to experience a small slice of the larger pie that is slated to arrive. We could imagine newer Android games to feature something similar when the time comes, especially for titles that require over 1GB of download.
Alongside announcing the new feature, Google also unveiled other upcoming improvements to Android-based gaming and its Play Store. These include smarter texture compression in order to optimise a device’s performance when gaming, a new anti-cheating framework via Play Integrity, and an improved Play Store pre-registration system for upcoming games. Google has yet to confirm when it is planning to release Android 12 to all supported devices at this time. That being said, the company is expecting the upcoming operating system will reach platform stability by August 2021. (Source: Google [Android developers page] via Android Authority)
