[Reproduced From Appnomy, the visibility platform for app developers.]
Android developers have found fragmentation to be a problem for various reasons but Google is looking to make life easier for developers with a new announcement and a much awaited feature. Android Market now has support for developers to upload multiple APKs for a single app. Let me explain this better.
Developer advantage:
Currently developers publish multiple versions of an app depending on OS compatibility or device compatibility. The new feature will allow developers to publish multiple APKs under the same app product heading. So these will be completely new APKs with different version codes and slightly different Android Market filters.
The truly beautiful utility of this feature is that users will see the same reviews and app description and see a single file for download. The Android Market will automatically download the right version for the user depending on their device.
There are 3 Android Market filters that will determine which of the multiple APKs are downloaded to the users device. These filters are based on OpenGL texture compression formats, API levels and Screen size. Setting the correct value for these will let developers maintain their app catalogues better.
User advantage:
A lot of the times that Android users download apps, they have a bit to worry about, whether the apps support they Android version and then they have to check if their device is supported. And I’m sure most users are already aware of the tablet apps problem, I mean there are no indicators in the Android Market that suggest that an app is optimized for tablets or not. Users will no longer have to worry about downloading the compatible version of the app.
