One of the most talked-about announcements from last year's Google I/O developer conference, Android Instant Apps, are getting closer to production-ready status and they hold big potential for both consumer and internally-facing applications.
Rather than force users to install an app, Android Instant Apps are highly modularized and get streamed to users' devices from Google's Play infrastructure. Users can choose to install the app permanently, and existing Android apps don't need to be rewritten.
Developers starting new projects only need to maintain a single source code tree, while creating different builds for the installable and instant versions.
Instant Apps don't provide the full functional equivalence of an installable app, omitting background notifications andd services. Google says this is in order to meet user expectations of a streamed, uninstalled app. However, other important Android features, such as payments, location and identity are included in Instant Apps.
Google has been working with a "small number of developers to refine the user and developer experiences," the company said in a blog post. "Today, a few of these Instant Apps will be available to Android users for the first time in a limited test, including apps from BuzzFeed, Wish, Periscope, and Viki. By collecting user feedback and iterating on the product, we’ll be able to expand the experience to more apps and more users."
Thousands of developers have shown interest in Instant Apps and more information will be released later this year, the blog adds. There are steps Android developers can take now to prepare existing apps for Instant, such as cleaning up bulky code and removing features that would be unsupported in the initial version of Instant Apps.
The overall point of Instant Apps is to blur the line between static web pages and a full-featured, installed mobile app—the latter of which users may not want to install or even have room for on their devices. For this reason, the benefits of consumer-facing Instant Apps are obvious.
There's good reason for enterprises to be excited about the Instant Apps concept, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller.
"For enterprises, it is interesting as it basically means something like VDI comes to the smartphone," he says. "Users don't have to wait to install an app, have permissions, use up storage or risk accidentally deleting it. Now they can be provisioned in an easy, lightweight way. There are also a lot of security advantages, since otherwise with installed apps a lot of MDM (mobile device management) would be needed. The question is: can Google get enough app builders to endorse this? Some enterprise use cases, such as HCM, are ideal for this kind of app delivery."
