The big change has arrived with the company announcing Instant Apps, this way we will soon have a future where apps and web come together to offer unique experiences. Without the need to download apps, Android phones can easily download chunks of code running the parts of apps required to play a video, sell an item or book a hotel room.
Now this news will certainly be welcomed by Steve Miller, the CTO and founder of mobile location service Glympse. He came across difficulty of sharing his app’s data and this comes across the hugest difficulty in signing up new users. “With Instant Apps, we can show a light-weight version of the app,” said Miller in an interview. “It’s phenomenal for us.”
Since two years Google is endeavoring to bring up together the convenience and openness of the web with the fast and fluid interaction of apps. Developers have been struggling hard with this issue for years with web promising to tear down barriers for people so they can easily talk, discover, share and work together online. It’s just that you require an internet connection and a browser.
Instant Apps proves to be helping tech companies in their attempt to solve this challenge as they work like a webpage but still is a native app on the phone. The technology allows sharing things on the web with a URL. It’s easy to anyone to click on the link so it runs just the parts of the app required to watch, shop or share. There is no need of installation with Android being able to download bits of the app in the background.
As per Google the webs-versus-app debate comes secondary to the significance of providing users and developers an amazing experience be it on any platform. “People want to hear that we have a grand plan to kill off one or the other,” said Ficus Kirkpatrick, a Google engineering director leading Instant Apps, during Google’s I/O conference. “I think the idea of the death of either one is really overrated. Both keep getting better. The lines are really blurring.”
Instant Apps is among the various emerging technologies promising to meet the gap between web and native experiences. Among them is progressive web apps announced by Google in 2015 and they work just as conventional websites in the browser adding native apps’ most alluring features, like they work offline, run on multiple devices, user data is saved and is easily installed on phones. Once visitors return to a site a number of times, a notification asks whether they desire installing the app on the home screen.
Google is planning to release the Instant App technology in the end of this year, whereas BuzzFeed, B&H Photo, Medium, Hotel Tonight and others are found in beta trials. It’s a big change in how we think about apps, and we want to get it right,” said Google product manager Ellie Powers at the I/O conference.
Well now it’s clear that there is no point of finding differences between native apps and websites with us heading towards a future where they won’t be huge difference. Ultimately, the user interface that will be needed by you in order to do things easily on your device maybe written or spoken requests. The simple way of doing so is to ask Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, or Amazon Echo.
