Google Play Store may offer more control over when your game auto installs (APK teardown)

Joe Hindy / Android Authority

TL;DR

Google Play Store may soon let you choose how your game auto-installs.
You’ll be able to set your preference to “Over any network” or “Over Wi-Fi only.”
Users will be notified to confirm their install preference if the game size is larger than expected.

Having the Google Play Store auto-install a game for you is a pretty convenient feature. However, it’s a little less convenient when it decides to eat up your mobile data to do so. Soon you may not have to worry about your games auto-installing while you’re away from a Wi-Fi network.

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An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.

Currently, the Play Store offers a Pre-registration feature for games that haven’t been released yet. Pre-registering will notify the user when the game is available and that game will automatically be downloaded if the user enables auto-install on the listing page. The only problem is that auto-install completely ignores the network preferences you set in Google Play’s settings. As a result, a game could choose to auto-install while you’re on mobile data.

In version 43.6.20-31 of the Google Play Store, we found code suggesting that Google will solve this problem. Users will soon be able to set their auto-install preference to “Over any network” or “Over Wi-Fi only.” Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get this feature to work by the time of writing.

Code

• Expected game size: ≤ %1$s
• Data charges may apply
• The game size is an estimate provided by the developer. If the actual size is larger at release, we will notify you to confirm your install preferences.
• Don’t auto-install
• Over any network
• Over Wi-Fi only
• Auto-Install preferences

Additionally, the Play Store will tell you the size of the install as provided by the developer. If the actual size is bigger than expected, the user will be notified of the actual size and they’ll be asked to confirm their installation preference.

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