New Google feature to speed up installation of priority apps during migration

If you have migrated to a new Android phone or are contemplating doing so, you’d know it’s not the easiest thing to do. The migration is cumbersome especially because the apps take a lot of time to update – one by one – on the new device and then sign in to all the apps. This may not be the case very soon – Google is reportedly working on a new feature called Install Hints, which will speed up the process of installing apps while migrating to a new device.

The feature is expected to help install frequently used apps from the likes of Play Store first. This install hints feature will make things easier and speed up the installation of important apps – to get you going while the other, lesser used apps, are installed later.

This was first discovered by XDA member luca020400 in the internal Android workings, which was later confirmed by a Google developer. Allegedly, the feature “adds an ‘install scenario’ field to the appropriate datastructures,” as an explanation, “This CL adds an ‘install scenario’ field to several data structures used by the Package Manager. This value will be used by a following CL to adjust the invocation of dexopt based on the indicated use case.”

Per the commits, the install hints feature would provide urgency tags to all the apps that are to install on the new device – these tags are Defaut, Fast, Bulk_Critical, and Bulk_Non_Critical. So for instance, you use Facebook more than WhatsApp, the former will be assigned a Bulk_Critical tag to be installed before the other apps.

The process of determining which app is of more importance to the user will be done by Google since Android can ascertain which app has been used longer by the user. So the apps of more importance will be installed first, followed by the apps of lesser importance – in the process making the installation of apps during migration smoother and quicker than now.