If there's a regular bane in Android phone owners' existence, it's the never-ending stream of app updates. Even though they're smaller than full downloads, they still chew up a lot of data -- just ask anyone who has sucked down hundreds of megabytes updating a new phone. Google's engineers have a better solution, though.

They're introducing a new approach to app updates that promises to radically shrink the size of updates with "file-by-file" patching. The resulting patches tend to be about 65 percent smaller than the app itself, and are sometimes over 90 percent smaller. In the right circumstances, that could make the difference between updating while you're on cellular versus waiting until you find WiFi.