Another one for the graveyard: Google to kill Instant Apps in December

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It was a good idea that arrived too late to matter.

Apps used to be the measure of a mobile platform's worth, with Apple and Google dueling over who could list the most items in their respective stores. Today, the numbers don't matter as much—there are enough apps, and Google's attempt to replace parts of the web with apps is going away.Instant Apps, a feature that debuted in 2017, will reportedly be scrapped in December 2025. In its place, you'll just have to use the Internet.

Developer Leon Omelan spotted this news buried in the latest Canary release of Android Studio (confirmed byAndroid Authority). The development client includes a warning that Instant Apps is headed for the Google graveyard. Here's the full notice, which is the only official confirmation from Google at this time.

Instant Apps wasn't a bad idea—it was just too late. Early in the mobile era, browsers and websites were sluggish on phones, making apps a much better option. Installing them for every site that offered them could be a pain, though. Google's Instant Apps tried to smooth over the experience by delivering an app live without installation. When developers implemented the feature, clicking a link to their websites could instead open the Android app in a similar amount of time as loading a webpage. Google laterexpanded the featureto games.

But that was then, and this is now. Today, an increasing number of mobile apps are functionally identical to the mobile websites they are intended to replace, and developer uptake of Instant Apps was minimal. Even in 2017, loading an app instead of a website had limited utility. As a result, most of us probably only encountered Instant Apps a handful of times in all the years it was an option for developers.

To use the feature, which was delivered to virtually all Android devices by Google Play Services, developers had to create a special "instant" version of their app that was under 15MB. The additional legwork to get an app in front of a subset of new users meant this was always going to be a steep climb, and Google struggles to incentivize developers to adopt new features. Plus, there's no way to cram in generative AI! So it's not a shock to see Google retiring the feature.

This feature is currently listed in the collection of Google services in your phone settings as "Google Play Instant." Unfortunately, there aren't many examples still available if you're curious about what Instant Apps were like—the Finnish publisherIlta-Sanomatis one of the few still offering it. Make sure the settings toggle for Instant Apps is on if you want a little dose of nostalgia.