Android 16 makes app updates instant with this clever change

When you update an Android app, the operating system freezes it to prevent it from running. This is an important step, as an app could experience issues if it tried to access code and resources that are in the process of changing. While most updates install almost instantly, some can take several seconds. This not only makes the app being updated temporarily unusable but can also affect other apps that depend on it. To improve this experience, Google has quietly introduced a change in Android 16 to make app updates faster and less disruptive.

This new feature, called “seamless app updates,” reduces the time an app is frozen during an update from several seconds to just tens of milliseconds. The improvement will be most noticeable for large, complex, or system-critical apps, which typically take longer to update.

To achieve this, Google has changed when the Android OS runs its dexopt and dex2oat scripts. These scripts are a key part of Android’s Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation mechanism, which makes apps run more efficiently. AOT compilation improves performance by translating an app’s DEX bytecode into native machine code before the app is launched. This eliminates the overhead associated with interpreting the code on the fly or using Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation, resulting in significantly faster startup and execution speeds.

In Android 16, these optimization scripts now run during an earlier phase of the installation process. Previously, Android performed these optimizations while the app was frozen, which prolonged the time it was unavailable. By running them sooner, the app only needs to be frozen for the brief moment it takes to swap the old files with the newly optimized ones.

Google’s release notes were light on details, so we don’t know if this change has other effects. Still, it’s a welcome improvement, especially now that the Play Store supports simultaneous app updates. While seamless app updates may not be as major as other Android 16 features, it’s a quality-of-life improvement that will benefit all Android devices, not just Pixels.