Making your app Instant

In the second half of 2016, about 25% of mobile apps were used only once after being installed. In addition, statistics also shows that 93% of installed apps are deleted from device within a month. In my own opinion, I feel there are several reasons for this massive uninstalls, but one of the most significant reason is resulted by lots of app features. Often times, we only rarely need to use a feature. Take, for example, I have a calculator installed on my device. Just because I want to add A+B, it does not necessarily mean that the app should be stored nonstop on my device. It can be annoying when you are at the verge of installing a very important update or something on your device and you see this

Ops!!!! This is a call for extra storage space…

Don’t tell me you haven’t seen this before…

So, if you need to try out new apps, trust me you might have to remove some apps.

>> device.remove(appA).install(appB)

Hey Wait there!!!

I have a good news for you, Android Instant Apps provide a great solution for exactly these use cases.

Android Instant Apps(Native Android apps, without the installation)

AIA allow users to access features they actually need and access them instantly, without having to download or install them. On the other hand by using instant apps developers are given the opportunity to showcase the most important feature of their app and thus overcome the target market for the complete version of the app.

AIA has come to stay and will undoubtedly be of enormous benefit to both app users and developers.

• Increase in app engagement
• 100x app visibility
• More storage space

Popular Instant Apps

Here are the few popular names of the instant apps: Dotloop, Vimeo and NYTimes Crosswords. Through instant apps, Dotloop was able to increase its user base by 60% and NYTimes crosswords were able to increase its sessions by 50%.

Getting started with AIA

Google Play Instant enables native Android apps to run without requiring installation. Apps which support Google Play Instant can run in various ways, such as when a user clicks a link in a text message, an email, or uses the “Try Now” button from the Google Play Store.

Building an instant app is not essentially complicated, it’s just that the process is completely different. The major difference is that the maximum size of this instant app is 4MB. Now, this is a challenge fitting a 50MB app into just 4MB.

From a developer perspective, this seems to be impractical. So, the way out is making different modules for each of the features and a different module for the base. However, ensure that the combination of both the base module and the feature module cannot exceed 4MB.

In programming this process is referred to as modularization, basically, you are developing a large system by breaking it down into many smaller features. While developing AIA, ensure that one feature is different from another, but they can call each other via deep linking. Make sure to plan your code primarily or else there will be risk refactoring the code into files and modules to refrain from bugs and complexities.

In my next article, we will convert an existing app to an instant app.

Are you ready?