th millions of apps in the ay Store enough space on our phones to comfortably store hundreds of them, updating can be a tedious, data-chomping process. Earlier this year, announced it was using a new Delta algorithm that reduced the size of updates by as much as half when compared to the old way of downloading As. Now it’s taking it a bit further in a continued push to save you time, space, money.

The new approach, called file-by-file patching, creates updates that are as much as 90 percent smaller than the full app. On average, the process trims download size by 65 percent, saving users some 6 petabytes of cumulative data each day, according to ’s estimates. As , software engineer on ay, explains in a post on the Android Developers Blog:

Imagine you are an author of a book about to be published, wish to change a single sentence—it’s much easier to tell the editor which sentence to change what to change, rather than send an entirely new book. In the same way, patches are much smaller much faster to download than the entire A.

As he goes on to explain in more technical detail, file-by-file patching is based on detecting changes in the uncompressed data of the new old files, comparing the two to determine they are a perfect match, finally recompressing the data back to the original size. He notes that processing power is an issue, so the technique may actually take longer on some older devices. Consequently, is limiting file-by-file patching to auto updates for the time being to ensure users won’t be adversely affected.

y this matters: Data overages are an increasing concern as we turn to our phones to do more more throughout the day, so any amount that can be saved is certainly welcome. ile many users undoubtedly opt to perform auto updates over -Fi anyway, file-by-file patching is an exciting look at how will one day be able to keep our phones up to date wherever we are without it eating away at our data plans or remaining storage.