Tag Archives: Instant Apps

Wrapping up for 2018 with Google Play and Android

Posted by Patricia Correa, Platforms & Ecosystems

Earlier this year we highlighted some of Google Play's milestones and commitments in supporting the 1M+ developers on the Play Store, as well as those of you working on Android apps and games and looking to launch and grow your business on our platforms. We have been inspired and humbled by the achievements of app and game developers, building experiences that delight and help people everywhere, as some stories highlighted in #IMakeApps.

We continue to focus on helping you grow thriving businesses and building tools and resources to help you reach and engage more users in more places, whilst ensuring a safe and secure ecosystem. Looking to 2019, we are excited about all the things to come and seeing more developers adopt new features and update to Android P.

In the meantime let's share some of the 2018 highlights on Google Play and Android:

Building for the future

Along with Android P we have continued to help the Android developer ecosystem, launching Android Jetpack, the latest Android Studio, and Kotlin support. Developers are also now able to add rich and dynamic UI templates with Slices in places such as Google Search and Assistant, APIs for new screens support, and much more. Discover the latest from Android 9, API Level 28.

Smaller apps have higher conversion rates and our research shows that a large app size is a key driver of uninstalls. At I/O we launched a new publishing format, the Android App Bundle, helping developers to deliver smaller and more efficient apps with a simplified release process, and with features on demand - saving on average 35% in download size! On devices using Android M and above, app bundles can reduce app size even further, by automatically supporting uncompressed native libraries, thereby eliminating duplication on devices.

You can build app bundles in the Android Studio 3.2 stable release and in Unity 2018.3 beta, and upload larger bundles with installed APK sizes of up to 500MB without using expansion files, through an early access feature soon to be available to all developers.

Richer experiences and discovery

Discovery of your apps and games is important, so we launched Google Play Instant and increased the size limit to 10MB to enable TRY NOW on the Play Store, and removed the URL requirement for Instant apps. Android Studio 3.3 beta release, lets you publish a single app bundle and classify it or a particular module to be instant enabled (without maintaining separate code).

For game developers, Unity introduced the Google Play Instant plug-in and instant app support is built into the new Cocos Creator. Our app pre-registration program, has seen nearly 250 million app pre-registrations, helping drive app downloads through richer discovery.

Optimizing for quality and performance

Android vitals are now more actionable, with a dashboard highlighting core vitals, peer benchmarks, start-up time and permission denials vitals, anomaly detection and alerts, and linking pre-launch reports - all so that you can better optimize and prioritize issues for improved quality and performance.

There are more opportunities to get feedback and fix issues before launch. The Google Play Console expanded the functionality of automated device testing with a pre-launch report for games, and the launch of the internal and closed test tracks lets you push your app to up to 100 internal testers, before releasing them to production.

Insights for your business, now and in the long term

Metrics are critical to optimize your business and we've added new customizable tools in the Play Console, with downloadable reports to help you evaluate core metrics. Including cumulative data, 30-day rolling averages, and roll-ups for different time periods to better match the cadence of your business.

You can now configure the statistics report to show how your instant apps are performing, analyze different dimensions and identify how many install the final app on their device. The acquisition report shows users discovery journey through to conversion - with average revenue per user and retention benchmarks against similar apps. You can also find the best performing search terms for your store listing with organic breakdown - helping to optimize efforts to grow and retain a valuable audience.

Increasingly developers are adopting subscriptions as their core monetization model. The dedicated new subscriptions center means you can easily change subscription prices, offer partial refunds for in-app products and subscriptions, and also make plan changes in Play Billing Library version 1.2. Learn how to keep subscribers engaged; users can pause plans, giving you more control with order management and the cancellation survey.

Discover how to use all the new features and best practices on the Academy for App Success, our interactive free e-learning platform, offering bite-sized courses that help you make the most of Play Console and improve your app quality.

Make sure you follow @googleplaydev and sign up to our newsletter to stay ahead of all our updates in 2019! We hope these features and tools will enable us to continue a successful partnership with you in the New Year - follow our countdown for a daily highlight. From all of us at Google Play - happy holidays.

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Streamlining the developer experience for instant games

Posted by Vlad Zavidovych, Software Engineer; Artem Yudin, Software Engineer

Google Play Instant enables people to experience your game or app natively without having to go through a full installation process. Removing the friction of installing is a great way to increase engagement, conversions, and lifetime value of your users.

Today, we've made it easier to build instant games and apps by removing the URL requirement. Previously, in order to publish an instant game you had to create a web destination for it. The website also had to be connected to the instant game through intent filters and digital asset links verification.

Now, it is no longer required to add URL-based intent filters to your instant game. People will be able to access the instant experience through a 'Try Now' button in the Play Store or Play Games apps, via deep link API, and in the future through the app ads.

While being particularly helpful for games which often don't have a corresponding website, the new URL-less functionality is available to both game and app developers.

How to develop and publish an instant game without adding URL support

Game developers using Unity or the latest Cocos Creator can take advantage of URL-less instant games by simply leaving the URL fields blank in the setup process.

However, if you have your own game engine or have built your game from scratch in C++, check the AndroidManifest to make sure it has the following intent filter declaration: 

<intent-filter>
   <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />
   <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />
</intent-filter>

Starting with Android Studio 3.2, you can create a new instant game, or convert your existing game, without associating a URL with it. In fact, this is now the default behavior. Here is a run through the process:

  1. First, make sure you're running Android Studio 3.2 or newer by either updating or downloading it here. Make sure to install Instant Apps Development SDK 1.3.0 or higher from Android SDK Manager.
  2. Then download a sample instant app from GitHub. In Android Studio, click File → New → Import Project… and import the downloaded "urlless" sample.
  3. Lastly, after gradle tasks are finished, click the green "Run" button with "instantapp" configuration.

You should see an instant game on your attached device. Instant runtime found and launched the entry point activity in your game with the ACTION_MAIN and CATEGORY_LAUNCHER intent filter.

Once you are ready to publish the sample instant game:

  1. Give your sample game a unique applicationId in app/build.gradle file by replacing existing applicationId - we don't want different applications with the same id.
  2. Generate signed APKs for both installable and instant version of our sample game.
    • In Android Studio, Build → Generate Signed Bundle / APK…
    • Choose APK for both "app" and "instantapp" modules.
  3. In the Play Console, create a new application, upload APK under "App Releases" tab, and then upload "instantapp-release.zip" under "Android Instant Apps" tab.
    • The installable app must be rolled out before the instant one.
  4. The rollout process may be familiar to most Android developers, but here's a step-by-step guide in case you run into any issues.

Once you publish your instant game, people can access it via a 'Try Now' button in Play Store within 24 hours or sooner. You can also send traffic to your instant game using the deep link API: 

market://details?id=MY.PACKAGE.NAME&launch=true&referrer=myreferrer

MY.PACKAGE.NAME refers to applicationId that you have replaced in app/build.gradle file.

What's next?

With the launch of Android App Bundle we are excited to further simplify the developer experience for Google Play Instant. In the coming months we are making it possible to deliver your app's or game's dynamic features instantly from the same bundle as your installable app or game. Stay tuned!

Check out more information on Google Play Instant, or feel free to ask a question on Stack Overflow, or report an issue to our public tracker.

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Android Instant Apps: Best practices for managing download size

Posted by Maru Ahues Bouza, Developer Relations Partner, Google Play
Android Instant Apps provides rich, native experiences at the tap of a web link. People can experience your app without upfront installation, enabling a higher level and quality of engagement.
However, to provide comparable latency of loading a mobile webpage, an instant app needs to be lean and well structured, so it can be downloaded and run quickly in response to a URL tap. In light of that, we encourage that the binary loaded in response any entry-point URL is as small as possible, with a maximum of 4MB. The smaller the binaries, the faster the instant app will load and the smoother the user experience.
This document will propose best practices for managing the application structure and binary size to enable a smooth instant app experience. These practices will also benefit your installable app.

Refactoring your codebase

The biggest binary size benefit comes from refactoring your app into multiple feature modules. Even if your current size and feature set don't require multiple features, we recommend designing for it, so you can quickly add more features in the future without affecting the binary size of existing features. We also highly recommend having a unified modular codebase to produce both installable and instant application binaries, as this will reduce the burden of maintaining separate projects and code and provide a cleaner project structure across both. Based on the experience of our early access partners, we believe this will have the largest impact to the binary size at download. However, it also requires the most investment.
To get to that end, you can start with a single (base) module and then refactor code by moving relevant portions to feature module(s). Note that you do not need to worry about the binary size while developing your instant app, as the size limit does not apply for locally built binaries. You can also publish your binary through the Play Developers Console to the Development track (special track for quick deployment of your instant app during development), where the size limit is 10MB. [1, 2] The 4MB restriction is applied once your binary graduate out of the Development track.
Each feature module can have one (or more) entry points – activities – that correspond to a given URL. When splitting a single code base into multiple modules, you will have different entry points for different features, and the platform will load the relevant feature as needed. Remember, the total binary to be downloaded for any given entry point should be under 4MB, so the combined size of any feature module and the base module must be below 4MB.
It is advised to define the feature–activity–entry point mappings first, and then structure the refactoring effort towards reducing the binary size for each entrypoint..
Also consider how your libraries are included. If a specific feature module requires certain libraries they should be included in the feature module only, instead of being added in the base APK. This will reduce the size of the base module. For example, let's say you have an application that depends on libraries X, Y, and Z. Initially, you may pack all the libraries in the base module by placing all the dependencies in the base gradle.build file. But if only the code in the feature module requires library Z, it makes sense to move that dependency from the base module to the feature module.This works as long as no other feature modules depend on the same library. If multiple feature modules use the same library it definitely makes sense to keep it in the base module.

Lint checks

Many apps tend to acquire a lot of resources, and over a period of time, some of them are no longer used. Android Studio has useful built in lint check for unused resources. Press Alt+Ctrl+Shift+I (Cmd+Alt+Shift+I on Mac OS), type "unused resources" and start "Unused resources Android|Lint|Performance" inspection. It helps to reduce the size of the installable APK as well.

String resources

Similar to resources, pay attention to strings, not all of them may be in use, and typically the application size can be reduced significantly by removing unused string resources. If application supports multiple languages, you may want to reduce the number of localized resources, as it typically removes large chunks of the resources assets. This is especially important if the app supports only a few languages but uses AppCompat library, which includes messages in multiple languages. Use resConfig to select specific resources configurations only. Hint: typically you can use "auto" to restrict configurations pulled from third-party libraries to match the set of configurations defined in your project.

Switch to WebP

Significant reduction of the drawable resources size may be achieved by switching to WebP images instead of PNGs. Android Instant Apps supports all features of the WebP format (transparency, lossless, etc.) so there will be no loss in functionality. Keep in mind that application launcher icons must use PNG format, but it should not be a problem since projects normally keep those in mipmap- directories. If a backward compatible solution is required, you need to include the original PNG images in the APK module and it will override WebP resources automatically (main source set overrides all resources from AAR/feature module). [4]
Of course, going with vector drawables may let you save even more of the precious space, but using vector drawables will require a code change while the above mentioned trick with WebP images for the instant app and PNG images for the installable APK requires no code modifications.

Download assets at runtime

Finally, remember that technically there is no need to pack all the resources in the instant app APKs, as the application can download additional assets at run time. This approach also enables the app to download the required assets only. These modifications may require significant changes to the code base, but will also help you to reduce the size of the installable APK.
If shrinking resources does not bring your app feature modules size under the limit, it is time to look for the ways to reduce the code size.

Review native libraries

Some third-party libraries may include native code, which may not be used in the instant app at all. So the first step is to review the native libraries packaged within the APK and make sure the instant app has only those that are actually used. Remember to look into the compiled APK using APK Analyzer (Build -> APK Analyzer…) [5]

Review external libraries

Next review the list of all external libraries linked with the app's code. You may find some unexpected surprises courtesy of transitive dependencies. Transitive dependencies occur when the library your project relies upon depends on another library, which in turn may depend on yet another library. Sometimes those transitive dependencies may contain unexpected surprises such as libraries you do not need at all (i.e. a JSON processing library you never use in your code.) Please see "Excluding transitive dependencies" section in the Gradle User Guide for further details.
Android Studio has several useful tools for analyzing the external dependencies for the project. It always helps to start with the Project view:
The "Project" view shows a section called "External libraries", where you can see all the libraries used by the project including any transitive dependencies:
In order to further reduce the base feature size you may need to pay attention to the code dependencies and external libraries. Check the "Project" view and look for unused libraries that might be transitive dependencies the project does not need. Also look for libraries that provide the same functionality (e.g. multiple libraries for image loading/caching). [4]
You can also compare different builds with APK Analyzer tool, and it works with instant APKs, too.
Finally, review the list of transitive dependencies and exclude the ones you do not need. Use the following command to review the dependencies graph: gradle -q :MODULE:dependencies --configuration compile. Further details can be found in the Gradle documentation.

Other tips

Android Studio 3.0 includes the App Links Assistant tool, which can help to generate the necessary intent filters, and help in splitting the project into several modules. [3]
Once you got the instant app bundles under the size limit, it is the time to make sure the building process is up to date. Check that the application package and instant app APKs are signed using the "APK Signature Scheme v2". If you sign the APKs using the latest version of the SDK tools, everything should be done automatically. However, if you manually sign the build artifacts you need to avoid using jarsigner and switch to apksigner instead.
And a few useful tips for adapting the app's code to the instant runtime environment. Keep in mind that having a small branches of code for instant/installable applications, based on the InstantApps.isInstantApp(...), should be fine and typically does not make the source code unreadable (unless you abuse it, of course). Also, when using share intents make sure the code does not explicitly enumerate applications installed on the device, instant app security model does not allow that. Simply use regular Intent.createChooser() to present the list of all possible actions to the user.
The level of effort of developing an instant app for an existing Android application varies across developers and is heavily dependent on how your application is organized today. For some, it will be easy as your project is already organized as multiple modules. However, for some, the focus will be on reducing the code and resource assets size, and we have introduced tools and Android platform features above to help you with that.

Hear from other developers using Android Instant Apps

Finally, check out these great posts by developers that have already built an instant app:
Visit the Android Developers website to get started with Android Instant Apps and check out more instant apps success stories from other developers.