Have you ever wanted to use an app once with no hopes of using it again? Google is now allowing Android apps to run instantly, without installation and how cool would that be. This is called Android Instant Apps. At the Google I/O last evening, the company announced this and demoed the technology on an Android phone running Kitkat Android version 4.0 which means even your current backward phone can support this. With Instant Apps, if someone sends you a link of a website that also has an app in the Google Play store, when you tap the link, Google Play just goes and fetches some part of the app and, well, boom, the app just opens and starts working. This actually changes the nature of a URL that we’ve known for a long time now on the web, as Android Instant Apps aims to make this faster.
Behind the scenes, the Apps gets split up into modules, so Google Play just grabs the parts necessary — and then you can install the full app if you want to. This is actually kind of huge — you get the experience of the web, where you don’t have to install anything when you open a tab, but you also get the power of a native app on your phone. Google said that developers will have to take “less than a day of work” to modularize their apps for Android Instant Apps. The demo we saw was on a phone running KitKat. So this will work all the way back to Jellybean. Google is working with a “small set of developers” now, and will roll Instant Apps out to users later this year.
