Google says Android 12 to let users play games while downloading them

Google has announced a new Android 12 feature at its Game Developer Summit. It is called “Play as you download,” which will let you jump “into gameplay in seconds while game assets are downloaded in the background.”

“Users want to start playing right away, but as game quality keeps improving, their size increases, leading to long, dull downloads,” the search giant said. Google Play product management director Greg Hartrell says that the reason for install cancellations is the time it takes for a user to download games and start playing them.

So, this Android 12 feature could be useful for large games as you won’t have to wait for a longer time to start playing a game.

The new “Play as you download” feature is available for all developers who publish games using the Play Asset Delivery system. The search giant is promising that once the feature is implemented, users will notice that games will be “ready to open at least 2 times faster” than before. For example, Google says a 400MB-sized game will take just 10 seconds to load instead of several minutes.

However, the new feature will only be accessible on those devices that are running the latest version of Android 12.

Apart from this feature, Google also announced a new game dashboard for Android 12. So, gamers will be able to easily access features like screen capture and recording. The company asserted that the new dashboard will be released for “select devices” later this year.