there’s just this vague recommendation to “turn it off in settings.” no link, no toggle, nothing.
had to hunt for the relevant setting in the app(even their settings menu is down under in the list when you tap on your avatar.
image transcription:
a screenshot of Google play store which has a popup that can only be disabled by pressing OK button at the bottom.
the popup contains the following text:
Google is optimising app installs with your help
Google Play makes apps faster to install, open and run based on what people are using most.
The first time that you open an app after installing, Google notes which parts of the app you use. When enough people do this, your apps will install faster.
App install optimisation is automatically turned on, but you can turn it off in settings. Learn more
Nobody here seems to understand the real technical purpose of this feature, so let me try to explain what’s really happening.
Android applications and much of the system are written in Java. In the beginning, this decision was made because it provides portability at least in theory and the language was familiar to developers, but this decision wasn’t without its disadvantages. This extra layer of the Java virtual machine led to laggy user experiences and increased memory use in the very first versions of Android.
The first attempt to fix this problem was the Dalvik runtime. This first solution incorporates a tracing style just in time compiler that translates Java into native code as it runs. An Android Kitkat, ART or Android runtime was introduced as a developer option and later became the default which offers full compilation to native code at install time. This led to a really long system update process and some complex apps took forever to install, so in Nougat Android moved to a hybrid design that only pre-compiles the most important parts of the application. This saves install time and system update time while still getting good performance by pre-compiling to native, and we fall back to JIT if unexpected code becomes a performance bottleneck when the user is actually using the app.
But which parts do we pre-compile? How do you know what code actually matters to the user experience?
This dialogue in Play is about sharing runtime information about which code was actually executed. Google aggregates this information so that when users install an app they also receive a file describing which parts are most commonly used and actually matter to performance so the system can focus on pre-compiling only this specific subset. Namely, this data is which classes and methods are expected to be hot, with special attention paid to the ones required to initialize the application.
From a technical perspective, I don’t really see how this places private user information at risk, and I agree that it needs to be the default for this design to work because most users aren’t savvy enough to understand what it actually does. Google tried to simplify it is much as possible in this dialogue, but it’s led to a lot of confusion especially for more technical users.
