The Google Play Store can finally download two apps at the same time. Google has been testing this feature for quite some time, and it’s now widely rolling out to Android users.
Google Play Store gets the ability to download two apps at once, but not update more than one simultaneously
This is, of course, an improvement, but it still feels like a missed chance. Why? Well, you still can’t update more than one app at the same time. That would be a more useful feature, and that’s something many people would agree on.
You install apps only once, while you constantly need to update them. Hence, being able to update more than one at the same time would be quite useful, especially to those of you who update them manually.
Let’s hope that change will become a reality in the future as well. Until then, that’ll have to do. In any case, if you start downloading two apps on your phone now, two will download at the same time. You can see that in the Play Store itself, and on some phones, it’s also visible in your app drawer/home screen (progress bar).
Up until now, if you chose more than one app, the second one was marked as ‘Pending’, and you had to wait until the first one was downloaded. The third one will still be marked as ‘Pending’, though, regardless of the size.
Apple’s App Store is still in the lead, though
It’s nice to see that Google is finally catching up to the Apple App Store in this regard. The App Store can download three apps at the same time, in case you were wondering.
Having said that, this change with simultaneous app downloads was spotted on the v40.6.31 of the Google Play Store. The change was visible on several Pixel phones and tablets (running Android 14), claims 9to5Google.
We’re not sure if this is a server-side changes, but it most likely is. Though it’s likely related to the version of the Google Play Store too, of course.
