Hot Update vs. Asset Bundle

With Cocos Creator 2.4 around the corner, this question came to my mind, in which case each one of these are better? Pros and cons?

For now, I’m translating the documentation and posts from the chinese site/forum to understand it, hope this discussion became bigger when the english documentation became bigger.

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pros:

  1. Asset Bundle is easier to use. It does not need any plugin. Hot Update plugin is more complicated.
  2. Asset Bundle is pretty much the same across different platforms.
  3. Asset Bundle is easier to extend. You can custom loading pipeline as your wish.
  4. Asset Bundle is more secure. With ‘MD5Cache’ option checked. Asset Bundle does not overwrite old files, so even if an update fails, older versions will still work.

cons:

  1. On native platform, Asset Bundle is not merged into a single file for now, which may result in too many download requests and can not get progress.(Maybe you can compress it into a file yourself.)

One point negative on asset bundle (AFAIK) is that it doesn’t do the sync thing that Hot Update does, only downloading the changed files after the 2nd update, specially if it is compressed.