How Android’s Instant Apps Is Going To Make Your Life A Whole Lot Easier
At this year’s Google I/O, Google revealed a new linking technology that it plans to incorporate in Android phones later this year – It’s called Instant Apps and it’s really handy.
Similar to deep linking on iOS and Android, Instant Apps is meant to open up the relevant app when a hyperlink is clicked on, taking the user to the relevant page in the App. The difference, however, is that instead of asking you to download the app in case you don’t have it (which is what happens currently), the relevant partof the app opens up instantly.This is one of those ideas that sounds so intuitive,you wonder why nobody else thought of it before.
Let’s take an example. You’re going through your Twitter feed, and all of a sudden you come across a tweet that’s warning people of a storm-front somewhere in Los Angeles. Interested, you click on the link. And it takes you to the Weather App, which it then wants you to download. Boring! And a terrible user-experience, to boot.
Enter Instant Apps. With the help of this amazing idea, you can use the Weather Appjust this one time. You get the benefits of the app, without the bother of downloading it and having it take up space on the phone.
But how does it work? Basically, when you click on a link, Google Play summons the parts of the app that you actually need – A map, a GPS position, a GIF, or any other relevant component. Once its job is done, you can close it, just like you would a browser tab. If you like what the app does, there’s a link in the corner to download the full version.
This is great for you because you can now use all the apps that you want to when you browse, but you won’t ever have to worry about a one-time-use app sticking around in your app drawer and wasting space.
At the conference,Ficus Kirkpatrick (Google’s Instant Apps engineering director) said,”It’s pretty important to us that this is an interactive-class experience, so apps are a few megabytes; something comparable to a mobile website. It really needs to be fast.”The apps are restricted to a size of 4mb; about the size of a webpage.
Google demoed an eCommerce app that takes you straight to the product page for the order and also a parking meter. The Instant Apps can be triggered by clicking on links or pairing with NFC tags.
It’s also easy for developers to add this feature! All developers have to do is to modularize their apps – Which means that they won’t have to build separate apps.
“One of the key things we want is for developers to not have to write another app,” said Michael Siliski, a project manager at Google, during the I/O Conference.”For a developer, this is an update to your existing app.”
Developers can take their existing app and just ensure that it makes use of the Instant Apps functionality. Once this is done, Google Play does all the power lifting, bringing the app to you for as long as you need to use it. And this will work on all Android versions way back up to Jelly Bean!
Suresh Ganapathy, Product Manager for Google, has stated on the Android Developers Blog that Google is working in collaboration with a select group of partners – Buzzfeed, Medium and Disney, to name a few – To fine tune the project and make sure it’s user-ready.
Developers can sign up on the Android Developers Website and stay tuned for updates. According to the blog, users can expect Instant Apps to be available on Android, “later this year.”
