DELTA: Delta encoding for less traffic for apps

The number of applications (or apps) in the Android Market exceeded 450,000 in 2012 with more than 11 billion total downloads. The necessity to fix bugs and add new features leads to frequent app updates. For each update, a full new version of the app is downloaded to the user´s smart phone; this generates significant traffic in the network. We propose to use delta encoding algorithms and to download only the difference between two versions of an app. We implement delta encoding for Android using the bsdiff and bspatch tools and evaluate its performance. We show that app update traffic can be reduced by about 50%, this can lead to significant cost and energy savings.