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Wouldn’t you like to have all the apps in the world on your phone – without downloading them one by one and without having your smartphone panicking about storage limits?
Google wants to make that happen through Instant Apps. If you’re a smartphone user, you’re surely familiar with this scenario: a friend shows you a new app they have downloaded, and you’re not really hooked.
You say you’ll try it, but more often than not, you don’t. But with Instant Apps, things can change drastically. The name is pretty self-explanatory. Google’s plan is to allow smartphone users access any app there is without having to download it from the Play Store.
The solution? Have users access the apps without downloading them – something Google has unveiled during this year’s I/O conference. Don’t worry; it doesn’t mean that all of the apps in the Android ecosystem will be pre-installed on a phone. The storage space it would require is ridiculous.
Instead, Instant Apps presents the user with smaller versions of the full versions, something that Google wants to make possible through a sort of marriage of web and apps.
App developers will have to create the instant versions of their applications before launching their product. It’s true, the solution means that if you want more people to use the app you created, you’ll have to do two times the work.
But thankfully, Google hopes to help these developers by offering them the necessary toolkits. As reported by Quartz, the tech giant already announced a similar effort in 2017 with the unveiling of progressive web apps.
Instant Apps comes with a small caveat, however; users will have to constantly be connected to the Internet in order to use them, something that not everyone can afford.
Even with generous mobile data plans, the access could still be limited by the data cap or the signal strength. Even with enough mobile data to spare, the speed could also influence how the apps perform.
Similar to other tech products presented during the Google I/O conference, Instant Apps should become available for the larger public in a couple of months. Even so, the search engine giant will have to work hand in hand with developers to make the progressive tech possible for smartphones.
Image Source: Fast Company
