With Android 12 (Android S) you may get to play games before they’re completely downloaded

Thanks to the uber-cool advancement in technology, the gaming industry is booming, specifically smartphone gaming. We can see high-graphics intensive games being released for smartphones as well.

In fact, heavy graphic titles like COD, Fortnite have made their way to smartphones. The Google Play Store has plenty of games coming up every week.

However, these games are huge in size and consume a huge chunk of internet data for downloading. And it goes without saying that downloading heavy games takes time.

But this scenario might change with the arrival of Android 12 (Android S) as Google is working on a new file system that will allow the applications or games to be executed while its binary and resource files are still being downloaded.

This new file system by Google which is under development is called Incremental File System. As spotted by XDA, according to a documentation by Google,

Incremental FS is special-purpose Linux virtual file system that allows execution of a program while its binary and resource files are still being lazily downloaded over the network, USB etc.

The purpose of this is to allow big size Android apps and games to be executed before they are completely downloaded.

Currently, to play any game which is huge in size requires the user to download the entire game in order to launch the game. But with the help of the Incremental FS, this would completely change.

In simpler words, if you download a heavy game let’s say 4-5GB in size, with the help of the Incrementa File System, its intro data will be downloaded first while the rest of the data will continue to download.

However, users might experience some small freeze while executing the game as the next set of data gets downloaded.

What we can say is that it is more or less similar to the already existing Instant App feature by Google that allows the user to try out the applications and games without the need of installing it.

Moreover, developers won’t need to put in extra efforts as the Incremental File System is implemented in the kernel.

Currently, Google is testing out this feature on Pixel 4 XL. As we are fast approaching the internal deadline for major Android 11 features changes, it is suspected that we will see this feature in Android 12 in 2021.

We will keep you in the loop until we have more information in this regard. In the meantime, do let us know your thoughts on this major development?

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