Maybe throttled unless it passes some kind of check for being "authentic" or something. Feels like that's the general pattern with Google now.
Hell, maybe it was related to implementing this feature. You can get parallel downloads from the store now because they changed how downloads are queued or something.
I haven't noticed that behavior in years. Usually I wake up in the morning, see the "new update" notification, check if there's anything I don't want updated, or else click "update all" and then go to the bathroom. By the time I'm back, everything is done and delivered.
Tbh, I only ever noticed that the Play Store didn't do parallel downloads like once a year when switching phones. I forgot about it the rest of the time lol
It'll improve the overall time. Pressing the download button doesn't saturate your downlink immediately, it's always a ramp up to max speed. Doing them in parallel saturates your connection much better.
Are you downloading from several mirrors at the same time? In that case it could be faster because the individual mirrors have a lower bandwidth than you have.
Wonder if google would do something like this, but I would guess they download everything from the same server local to you, so I don't think it should have any effect really.
It couldn't download while an app is installing. So while an already downloaded app was installing, you had nothing downloading until it finishes installing.