Google has made available a number of applications as Instant Apps, using lightweight software that loads with a URL tap and installs on the go. Google has recently announced that several Android applications are ready as Instant Apps. Although “thousands of developers” have expressed their interest in building such applications, Google has named only four […]
Google has made available a number of applications as Instant Apps, using lightweight software that loads with a URL tap and installs on the go.
Google has recently announced that several Android applications are ready as Instant Apps.
Although “thousands of developers” have expressed their interest in building such applications, Google has named only four of them – BuzzFeed, Periscope, Viki, Wish – as being ready for the general public to test in order to gather feedback and improve the framework.
They intend to open up the SDK and make the framework available to all later this year.
Instant Apps is Google’s new approach to deep linking. Instead of having a web application and navigating to a certain page of it based on its URL, a user can take a regular Android application, split it up in modules, and a certain module is loaded and run when the user chooses a related action in another application, without having to install the application.
Google introduced this functionality last year at Google I/O. InfoQ has covered the subject at that time, providing information on how Instant Apps work, what are the benefits, what are some of the conditions to be met by developers and how to publish one. We won’t mention those details here.
Users will get access to them for a limited test to generate feedback for product iteration, according to Android’s developer blog.
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