How we may soon no longer need to install apps with help from Google and Surprisingly: Apple.
“There’s an App for That.”
It’s the trademarked slogan that defined the mobile world since 2008. Surely, apps seemed to be the way
to go. Coding bootcamps that claimed to teach you app development chops
within weeks popped up everywhere; products used commercials to go out
of their way and show off their new apps; heck, even that family
restaurant around the block got its own menu app built.
With
the release of the App store in 2008, Apple was the first to popularize
the idea of nicely packaged, downloadable applications on your phone.
However, this concept of centralized software distribution isn’t
actually new. Many handheld and desktop devices
already had some form of application store built in years before
Apple’s App Store debut. The reason why Apple succeeded, in retrospect,
is a combination of timing and technology. By 2008, the iOS (then
“iPhone OS”) platform was able to offer access to a maturing 3G network,
a well-documented development environment, great handheld graphics, and
most importantly, the backing of a technology giant. Mobile apps made
sense. They were the most efficient way to deliver the newest content
and services with native experience and performance.
People
don’t care how it all works, they just want to throw birds at pigs and
show off their #nofilter selfies. The ability to download and run cool
apps was the iPhone’s winning feature for a short while. Android soon
followed suit. Smartphones became cheaper; networks became faster;
handheld processing power quadrupled; apps prevailed.
You
see, mobile apps succeeded because of the right combination of fast
network and capable handheld processors. Technologies have progressed
much further than that in the meantime, and the world of apps has grown
beyond a healthy size. Among all of the headaches that follow the
impenetrable mobile market today, the two most urgent would be the delivery and discoverability of content.
Delivery and Discoverability
Everyone
with a smartphone has experienced this at some point: “Wow, this
restaurant/shop is offering 20% off the special entree…oh, but only if
you have this app,” or “Wait, I have to download an app for this? I just
to want to see what my friend posted.” You probably heard from a friend
or saw in a billboard about this really cool app that’ll transform your
life, but hesitated to install it, or worse, pay for it.
Image by Branch Metrics
The problem is twofold. Let’s start with the first: delivery.
Your average digital couch potato now has a shorter attention span and
less patience. Paying for and installing an app, what was once a
magical, fast, and smooth experience, is an act of commitment for many
nowadays. You won’t believe how many people demand a convincing reason,
your heartfelt speech, and your first-born child just to get them to try
out a new app. Just think about that one friend who still refuses to
download the Messenger app (seriously just get it already). Companies
want to deliver content and services to customers as fast and easily as
possible, but the increasing reluctance for the perceived
installation-barrier is putting up a delivery obstacle. Our home screens are the new San Francisco — space is at a premium.
The second problem, discoverability,
is a little bit more subtle, but was well articulated by a few tech
journalists in the past. Many popular apps, such as Instagram and The Daily,
began as mobile-only apps that surfaced great content only within a
closed platform. You had to download and register for Instagram in order
to see your friends’ Instagram photos. I’m sure that there are many
more apps out there today that I’m not aware of with useful content that
are not searchable or viewable on your browser. A
fragmented Internet where creative and original content are locked up
in proprietary platforms is not the Internet we know and love.
App Linking and Indexing Works, But Not Good Enough
GIF by Branch Metrics
Now
that we understand the problems, let’s take a look at the current
solutions. The word “app linking” may not sound familiar to you, but
every time you tap on a YouTube link in another app and the YouTube app
opens up to play the video, you’re experiencing it. Google, Apple, and
Facebook have all implemented variations of this technology. App linking brings you to the app that best presents the content you want. Great.
The
other half of our existing solution to compliment app linking is app
indexing. Google and Apple have provided ways for third-party content
providers to show their own in-app content in a search query, allowing
previously locked away content to surface on Google and iOS Spotlight.
Perfect.
That seems to have solved our delivery and discoverability problems.
User searches for something, in-app content shows up in the results,
user clicks the link and gets brought into the app.
You
might have already noticed the problems here. What if the app doesn’t
support app linking and indexing? App indexing requires the content
provider to actively put effort into implementing it,
so by default, your content is not visible to the world wide web,
exactly opposite of how most web-based content work. And only until
recently, in order for your app to be indexed by Google, developers had
to build mirroring web versions. Just imagine the troubles. On the
consumer side, what if I don’t have that app to begin with? What if I
don’t want to install that app just to read an article? The list goes
on.
Think
about that one time when you tried to check out something and it
redirected you into App Store instead. Very annoying. And no, no one
wants to install your app.
I don’t want to maintain a walled garden of apps. I want to consume and create content.
“So then, what is the solution?”
Just get rid of “apps.” Let’s see how we might be able to do this.
App Streaming from Google
Google’s
approach to the delivery and discoverability problem has relied on app
indexing and linking. If the developer puts in the effort, users can see
previously mobile-only content surfacing on Google search results. This
is great for Google to stay relevant in a mobile market that is
increasingly reliant on native app content instead of web search. But in
countries like China and India, where mobile phones are the first
computers for millions of people and mobile-only content is king, where
does a search engine provide their links to begin with? Suddenly,
“everything is just a Google search away” loses its magic.
Roughly
four months ago, Google rolled out an impressive technology that almost
no one remembers — App Streaming. It does exactly what it sounds like;
instead of installing applications like we’re used to, you tap a link to
the content and Google will stream the right parts of the app to you
on-demand. No need to install it, ’cause you’re already running it. It
might be Google’s first pilot experiment of their cloud platform, but
the idea of streaming applications onto your phone is not new. In fact,
the very technology itself was bought by Google from Agawi a few years back.
Combine
App Streaming and App Indexing, suddenly you remove the two barriers to
all information previously locked away in mobile apps.
On-Demand Resources from Apple
While
Google’s fantastic solution is still in an experimental stage, Apple is
nudging its developers in more or less the same direction, albeit
characteristic of Apple, in a less obvious or more incremental way.
On-Demand
Resources (ODR) is a technology released with iOS 9 that downloads a
small core application only on installation, and then downloads extra
parts and content as needed. ODR currently is being used mostly in
games, where a user only downloads the assets (graphics, videos, etc.)
for a few beginning levels. iOS will then download more levels as the
user progresses, and delete assets for completed levels to make space.
How
does this mirror Google’s approach? It doesn’t. However, if ODR becomes
commonplace and the supporting infrastructure is flexible enough, you
can reasonably imagine Apple extending the framework to a more general
use case. In any case, they got this wonderful tool under the belt that
will potentially blossom into a form of install-free applications.
The Underrated Quest for Web Apps
While
we’re on Apple, I want to bring up Steve Jobs’s vision of the first
iPhone. You might still remember fondly that the first iPhone was a
closed platform with no developer environment or third-party apps. His
solution? Web apps.
Web
apps don’t need to be installed. They run (relatively) securely in
closed browser environment. They are web friendly, meaning they can be
indexed and surfaced by search engines. Oh wait, isn’t that exactly what
we want today? Probably.
This is probably the one billionth time you’ve seen this picture. But I’ll put it up anyways.
I’m
still leaning on the belief that web apps were simply Steve Jobs’s
transitional plan to native apps, but even so, I think he was (at least
accidentally) onto something. If we had in 2008 the powerful Javascript
frameworks we have today, perhaps web apps would have taken off. Feel
free to paint the story into one where Jobs the Visionary foresaw the
discoverability and delivery problem, because perhaps he did predict
this.
A Future without Apps
A
lot of what app streaming offers competes with other sophisticated web
app technologies (React Native, etc.) that are quickly closing the gap
between native and web. However, one decisive differentiating factor
would still be the native look and feel or possibly performance that web
apps sorely lack. There is just no perfect solution yet.
On top of it all, what we really need is a platform-agnostic solution to app streaming that truly overcomes content delivery and discoverability problems. We want something akin to Java applets on browsers
(yikes) on mobile. Imagine the possibilities: regardless of the OS or
the brand of supercomputer you have in your pocket, you will be able to
run an app and view its content with zero friction and with native feel
and performance. As for developers, you can write an app once and stream
it to all devices and browsers.
With
Google streaming apps to your phone and Apple nudging developers to
store parts of their apps in the cloud, we may have just entered the
beginning of a future where installation becomes obsolete and the border
between “website” and “native app” is blurred. This is a future without
apps. And it’s wonderful.
The user forefront of all these insanely complex, powerful, and cool technologies is one of ultimate simplicity and elegance.
App Linking and Indexing Works, But Not Good Enough
Think about that one time when you tried to check out something and it redirected you into App Store instead. Very annoying. And no, no one wants to install your app.
I don’t want to maintain a walled garden of apps. I want to consume and create content.“So then, what is the solution?”Just get rid of “apps.” Let’s see how we might be able to do this.Roughly four months ago, Google rolled out an impressive technology that almost no one remembers — App Streaming. It does exactly what it sounds like; instead of installing applications like we’re used to, you tap a link to the content and Google will stream the right parts of the app to you on-demand. No need to install it, ’cause you’re already running it. It might be Google’s first pilot experiment of their cloud platform, but the idea of streaming applications onto your phone is not new. In fact, the very technology itself was bought by Google from Agawi a few years back.
Combine App Streaming and App Indexing, suddenly you remove the two barriers to all information previously locked away in mobile apps.
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