Instant Apps for Android have been one of Google’s most interesting technologies for mobile developers. In their earliest incarnation, Instant Apps were mostly useful for developers of relatively straightforward apps. Earlier this year, Google launched its beta of Instant Apps for games, too, which allows players to get a sense of the gameplay before actually installing the full game. Until now, this was only available to a small number of game developers, but starting today, all game developers will be able to build instant apps and showcase them in the Google Play store and anywhere else a user can tap on a link.
In today’s announcement, Google also notes that it has started testing Google Play Instant compatibility with AdWords, so that developers can direct users directly to their game after they tap on an ad. It’s unclear when exactly Google plans to roll out support for these ads, though.
The showcase app for today’s launch is Candy Crush Saga, an app that probably doesn’t need the extra promotion, thanks to its more than 500 million installs on Android already.
Regular Instant Apps have to be less than 2 MB in size. That obviously isn’t a realistic restriction for games, which have far more graphical assets, for example, to fit within this limit. So for games, Google went with a 10 MB limit and, based on what I’ve seen from some of the apps that were already in the Google Play store, those apps still load extremely fast (and to put that 10 MB limit into perspective, it’s worth remembering that many a website weigh in at significantly more than that).
