Google updates iOS app to load faster, support AMP

Google has announced in its blog that its iOS app for iPhone and iPad is now faster. The download time has been reduced and new features have been added to speed it up. Unni Narayanan, Director, Product Management at Google says in the blog post,“Each time you open the app or do a search, everything will load just a bit quicker. Whether you can notice the difference or not, these small improvements will save app users a combined 6.5 million hours this year.” The Google app for iOS will also support AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages. With AMP, news articles from some publishers will load instantly. Users can look out for the lightning bolt and ‘AMP’ next to articles in the ‘Top Stories’ section of their search results to view news faster. Users can also watch sports highlights instantly from their Now cards. When a card with sports highlights is tapped, it can be watched from within the app. Earlier this month, Google had announced an offline mode to its translation app. Google reduced the file size of the language modules used for offline translation. This requires a one time download, after which translations from and to the chosen languages can be done offline. The footprint of these language modules in the application has been reduced. This is to be conservative on the bandwidth of users, as well as occupy less space on the system. The size of each offline translation language package is 25MB, a reduction of around 90 percent. There are 52 languages available for offline translation.