Google Lets You Use Apps Without Having to Download Them

This week Google unveiled something

it's calling Instant Apps.

They're all like normal apps, except instead

of going into an app store,

and downloading it and installing it on your phone,

you click a link, and an Instant App is ready to go.

So here's an example of an apartment rentals app,

called Zephyr, so imagine, I'm lookin' for an apartment

with my wife and she sends me a link.

She's been using the Zephyr app to find some apartment.

She says, Hey, Duane these look worth looking at.,

but I don't have the Zephyr app installed on my phone,

but I can just click on the link,

and it'll bring up the Zephyr app,

and I'll drop right into the page that she was looking at.

I can flip through different apartment listings,

I can look at the map, and pan around the map,

zoom in, use all of the native capabilities for that,

and then if I pick, like an apartment,

I could just click on it and then share it

right back to her, as if I had, you know,

gone through installing the app and I had it on my phone,

but when I'm done, the Zephyr app

is not on my phone any longer.

It's actually pretty clever.

It works by taking a traditional app,

and chopping it into pieces.

Each of those pieces is called an atom.

Each atom is assigned a small subset of features

from the larger app.

Because it's so small, it can open as quickly as a web page,

and because it's only assigned specific features,

it can perform those specific tasks,

just as powerfully as the traditional app.

Developers can modularize their apps

and enable deep linking in their apps,

and that means that anytime a user taps

on one of those deep links, Google Play

can download, just the parts of that app

that are needed to show the experience

and run it instantly.

[Robbie] So Google won't be rolling out Instant Apps

until later this year, but if they work as advertised,

they could change the way you use your smartphone forever.