title: Google Play - reduce update size
body: <p>I am developing a <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.avitus.firstflight" rel="nofollow">game</a> for Android it´s currently in open beta and I have published a few updates already. I noticed that you always need to download/update the whole app, which is pretty bad for bigger games.</p>
  
  <p><strong>My Question:</strong> Can you kinda split-up parts of the game so the user only needs to download smaller parts? (Like a resource-pack, config-files,...)  </p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><strong>Are Expension Files the answer?</strong> As far as I understood them, they are meant for really big games which need more space than 50MB and are meant to be used mainly for big files.<br>
  Is it possible to make an Expansion Fack just for config files, and only update that EF, making updates smaller?   </p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit:</strong> (See <a href="http://developer.android.com/google/play/expansion-files.html#Rules" rel="nofollow">here</a>)</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>You cannot issue an update to your application by changing the expansion files alone—you must upload a new APK to update your app. </p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>If I am understood this correctly, I can´t update an Expension File without also updating the APK, which the user would need to download. (And that´s what I am trying to avoid)</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><strong>Manually downloading files</strong><br>
  I could check if there is a new version of config-files available on my server, and if yes, download them before every launch of the game. Would that be a possible solution?  </p>