12 ms·

Apple is developing a feature for using apps without requiring full downloads

124 points by djrogers 7y ago

netsharc 7y ago
I wonder if a phone OS will move to Google Stadia-esque offer: your device is just a remote viewer, everything including rendering the UI happens on their backend (Marketing has a field day touting Cloud-features), and is streamed to your device. Of course it'll be limited to places with high speed cellular Internet, but hey 15 years ago no one thought we'd be able to stream 3D games over the Internet..
- thekyle 7y ago
  This is similar to AWS Workspaces but for mobile. The biggest concern is obviously privacy and security.
riyadparvez 7y ago
It seems very similar to Android feature called Google Play instant: https://developer.android.com/topic/google-play-instant https://developer.android.com/topic/google-play-instant.
- adwww 7y ago
  This (or something like it?) has been available for ages, but the only time I've ever actually encountered it in the wild is with links to a JIRA project.
  - code_duck 7y ago
    Zillow has been one app I’ve seen using this - visiting their site resulted in an offer to use the app without installation.
  - cryptoz 7y ago
    I think the Weather Channel does / did have an Instant App
  - cglong 7y ago
    I have two: CBC News and Yahoo Finance. (You should be able to find them in the list of apps in Settings)
  - holoduke 7y ago
    We have this instant app feature in our roadmap for more than 2 years. Every time we start with it, we run into the endless list of difficulties to get it to work. Max size, different modules, shares resources etc. It's hell on earth for most devs. That's why you see almost no apps having it. The idea is nice from a Google perspective. I would rather just add a link to each app in the playstore which goes to the app website. Up to the developer to create a web version of it. But of course this gives zero control to goole
  - beatrobot 7y ago
    Vimeo has one
  - eythian 7y ago
    A local news site uses it, however as that's in a (distant) second language for me, and I discovered their app doesn't let me select to copy-paste words into a translator, it wasn't useful. Probably just an issue with their app implementation however.
    - agustif 7y ago
      Screenshot -> OCR -> Translate
- dheera 7y ago
  These shenanigans make me wonder why they don't just focus on making HTML5 apps a better experience. If they provided better widgets (e.g. including swipe gestures, which Angular/Polymer/MDL don't) and access to native hardware we'd be set. HTML5 is just 100X easier and nicer to program with than that abomination of Android Studio followed by aligning, keysigning, and other steps. The HTML5 hello world is <html><body>Hello World</body></html> The native hello world is no less than 74 files of garbage, Gradle configurations, and other nonsense.
  - diggan 7y ago
    It requires three things that are famously hard for Apple (and Google and many others too, not just Apple, to be fair) to achieve: - Work with others on standards - Expose things on a open platform that won't allow you to have full control over what's possible for developers and users to do and use - Admit that sometimes you're wrong and you have to change according to others
    - dheera 7y ago
      If all you want to do is deviate from standards on purpose, just change <html> to <apple_ml> and base64 encode the .html file (for no reason) and call the resulting file .iapp. Done. Standards broken. Proprietary status achieved with minimal effort. Change ".css" to ".bss" if you want to go the extra mile. and leave everything else as-is? Sounds like a win-win for both developers and biz dev.
      - giancarlostoro 7y ago
        This is partially what the Fitbit Ionic is doing actually hah.
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        > .bss Sadly already taken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.bss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.bss
        7y ago
rgovostes 7y ago
I guess not to be confused with Apple's Clips app which is for making short selfie videos. https://www.apple.com/clips/ https://www.apple.com/clips/
- bnj 7y ago
  For anyone with an iPhone who has never given this app a try, I recommend it-- it's surprisingly powerful and fun to use
  - djrogers 7y ago
    Agree - just used it today to mash together 5 videos of my family saying happy birthday to my sisters. Worked great, and a really fun result.
jonawesomegreen 7y ago
Sounds like a great attack vector to me.
- unnouinceput 7y ago
  How?
diggan 7y ago
> this new API, we can say that it allows developers to offer interactive and dynamic content from their apps even if you haven’t installed them Also formerly known as Web Applications but now made by Apple with the added features of less control from the developers, a 30% mandatory fee if you accept any payments of any kind and locked to just one platform.
- djrogers 7y ago
  Nice snark, however web apps are still possible, and Android has a very similar feature (Instant - enabled by slices). Did you provide similar feedback when that was announced?
  - lainga 7y ago
    Please, have curious conversation; don't cross-examine.
    - lowtolerance 7y ago
      I think it’s perfectly reasonable to question the degree to which bias plays a factor in one’s reception to just about anything.
  - diggan 7y ago
    > Did you provide similar feedback when that was announced? I did not, as I'm a lot more bored at this point in time and also have a lot of more free time. But I do feel the same about both of the platforms movement towards "instant apps" that could have been equally solved by making web apps work better on respective platforms, instead of trying to solve the same problem again.
    - kllrnohj 7y ago
      > But I do feel the same about both of the platforms movement towards "instant apps" that could have been equally solved by making web apps work better on respective platforms, instead of trying to solve the same problem again. The web ecosystem has been trying to solve this for almost a decade now and has made relatively little progress. There's no reason to believe Apple could suddenly solve it in a few months if they just cared a little harder. Web components & shadow dom are approaching 10 years old and still have issues with framework & browser support. asm.js is 7 years old, yet the ideas birthed from it are still struggling. Effective parallelism is still largely nonexistent. RAM & CPU/GPU efficiency remain a bad joke, made worse by the entire world now running on battery power. A huge number of people are working on making web apps more viable, including people at Apple. It's not from a lack of trying at this point. The foundations are just all terrible & wrong for being an app platform. That's never what it was built or designed to be, and retrofitting that without breaking compatibility is really really difficult. If it turns out the incremental delivery benefits of the web can be retrofitted to an existing app platform more easily than the web can be retrofitted to be an app platform then... well, why not? The cross-platform-ish nature of the web was (and is) a great dream, but why can't that dream be realized by SwiftUI instead? Or Flutter? Or whatever? Why must it be web alone that gets to be that thing?
diebeforei485 7y ago
This is probably going to make iOS more bloated, but perhaps Apple could surprise us. If people swap out QR codes with malicious ones in real life, that could have all sorts of implications.
- jamil7 7y ago
  > If people swap out QR codes with malicious ones in real life, that could have all sorts of implications. This can already happen with a QR code and a website? I doubt these aren't going to be heavily sandboxed.
jonplackett 7y ago
This could be a real game changer. I think it might be part of the drive into AR Instagram and snapchat have ways to launch interactive experiences from a code and I’ve always thought Apple are missing a trick there. One of the biggest hurdles getting clients to make apps now is “no one downloads apps anymore” so this could make a huge difference and make more frivolous interactive experience work in apps again. I hope this happens soon.
layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
Considering that nowadays the average website is clocking in at dozens of megabytes of obfuscated JS and/or WebAssembly, I'm looking forward to lightweight and snappy native applets as an iOS alternative. Hopefully Apple enacts a hard limit on size.
anfilt 7y ago
Sounds like a horrible idea. Why on earth would I want the act of scanning a QR code to start downloading & executing random code. Heck native code too since they say it's an app.
- Kuinox 7y ago
  Well that what you are doing when you scan a QR code a put the URL in your browser. You download random code that the server send to you, and execute it.
- spike021 7y ago
  I doubt in practice it would be completely random. Most likely it would still need to be reviewed/verified by the App Store review board, and most likely it would still require asking for permissions just like any other app.
galuggus 7y ago
This looks similar to wechat mini programs. They are instants apps availible from within the chat app. They are very easy to share. They are a real game changer. E. G you go to a restaurant scan a qr code and order and pay through the mini program.
esmi 7y ago
Wouldn’t it be more surprising if Apple wasn’t working on something like this? Even if it is true, basically it sounds like someone leaked out a test build of something. They’re probably prototypes for all kinds of crazy things, some good some bad, just like everywhere.
habosa 7y ago
Android has Instant Apps. Not sure how others feel but I hate it. Compared to a website it's slower to load, harder to share, and outside of my normal flow. I guess it would be cool for a demo but I dunno. Also iOS apps are so large this won't be practical at all on cellular data.
- kitsunesoba 7y ago
  >Also iOS apps are so large this won't be practical at all on cellular data. They don't have to be. For example Tweetbot, which is a fully functional app, is only about 7MB. It's not hard to imagine that a single screen of an iOS app specifically optimized for space could be only a fraction as large – considerably smaller than the average site these days (10MB+).
  - novok 7y ago
    They're big because of swift. Tweetbot is small because it's still only Objective-C.
    - kitsunesoba 7y ago
      That should be changing as more apps drop older iOS versions and stop bundling Swift.
      - jamil7 7y ago
        Exactly, an app of mine targeting iOS13+ weighs in around 2mb.
zoom6628 7y ago
MIUI has had this for a couple of years already. Leverages the Android feature for Google Play Instant as @esmi mentioned. I dont know how it works but effect appears to be a wrapper of sorts is setup for the app so the app itself does not get installed. Not all apps support this mode for reasons with which i am not familiar.
solarkraft 7y ago
This is going to be another Apple success story along the lines of: Yes, others have had this for years in theory, but nobody actually ever used it. Apple enter the market super late but instantly capture it fully because they're the only ones not monumentally sabotaging themselves.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mrtksn 7y ago
I have an app written in Swift and weights between 8-20Mb(depending on device and iOS version), which is not too far of from a typical website these days and the startup times are phenomenal(between 250-500ms, depending on the devıce). Writing in Swift is a delight and this is the feature I was dreaming about because having the user to install the App is not easy these days(100 impressions on Appstore Search would get me about 8 installs) however the people who install it are quite happy according to the feedback. I would imagine that the experience is similar to Apple's AR experience on Safari, which I feel can be improved but much nicer than opening the Appstore still. Let's hope that it's not too limited and can be possible to give a good feel to the user about the App's full functionality. The article talks about letting the dev to pick which part of the App would be presented but I suspect that the actual implementation would be similar to making an App Extensions - basically creating a separate mini-app that shares the codebase and the resources.
- novok 7y ago
  With Objective-C apps, it used to be even better, in startup and in app size. I think you can still get similar app size if you make a pure Obj-C app today.
  - mrtksn 7y ago
    Before Swift become a thing I look at Objective-C but it was so irritating that I stuck with JavaScript. It's probably faster but what difference it would make to open the app faster than what the user can perceive? I can use static images to give the impression that the app is already running, which is recommended by Apple anyway since the user won't be able to react before the app is fully loaded anyway.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    On modern versions of iOS, the runtime ships with the system so even your Swift app can be hundreds of kilobytes to a few megabytes.
    - novok 7y ago
ianetaylor 7y ago
Is this like Microsoft Office 'click to run'?
madrox 7y ago
Every time I hear about things like this, I think about XKCD's take: https://xkcd.com/1367/ https://xkcd.com/1367/ We really are reinventing web pages on a regular basis
fxtentacle 7y ago
The reason why this is needed at all is because a todo list regularly needs 20 MB updates. The problem is that there is no incentive for developers to keep their apps small. And since Apple makes money from selling larger phones, they also have an incentive to tolerate bloat. And lastly, your provider will be happy to charge you astronomical fees for downloading that critical update over mobile data. There's nobody making money from small apps but 2 of 3 parties can monetize bloat. So bloated apps it is! The name Clips and the QR scanning suggests to me that this will be used for advertisements, like those AR overlays.
- jamil7 7y ago
  Well if the feature is successful and apple puts a hard limit on binary size for it then it might incentivise developers to ship less bloated apps.
BiteCode_dev 7y ago
So, apple don't want web app to be first class citizens and then reinvent web apps?
- camdenlock 7y ago
  The web is the biggest threat they face to their App Store. They see the writing on the wall with technologies like wasm blossoming, and with web APIs beginning to open up possibilities for “native”-quality apps. So they’re interested in anything that can reduce the friction necessary to get into native iOS apps.
  - uthrowaway99 7y ago
    It's quite amusing to look back to iPhoneOS 1, where they doubled down on web apps without an AppStore.
luxuryballs 7y ago
Seems like a terminal, storing the content in the cloud like a container where the app lives up there instead of in your localhost, but still uses the native interface APIs.
acd 7y ago
This is common in Windows environments and is called app streaming / virtualization there. It’s been included in Enterprise editions of Windows feature called AppV. This must be something similar. App Store sales more profitable than iphone/iPad device flash size?
Someone 7y ago
They already have such a feature: on-demand resources (https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/FileManagement/Conceptual/On_Demand_Resources_Guide/index.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Fi...) The change seems to be that this allows all code to be downloaded on demand, not just scripts.
whoisjohnkid 7y ago
Hope the security around this is air tight. Otherwise this will definitely be a new attack vector hackers will be using to get malicious binaries running on your phone.
buboard 7y ago
looks like they are reinventing the web?
kkarakk 7y ago
Every app i've seen use this uses it to implement a "microsite". for eg nytimes made an instant app for the crossword puzzle on android... except if i'm into crossword puzzles i'll download the app anyways,why the hell would i download the instant app everytime unless it was part of my "flow" ie read the new york times paper and then the crossword is sent to my phone automatically or something? except i'd be reading the paper on my phone as well? the usecase for these kinds of things is so muddled and unclear i don't understand the point...

124 points by djrogers 7y ago

I wonder if a phone OS will move to Google Stadia-esque offer: your device is just a remote viewer, everything including rendering the UI happens on their backend (Marketing has a field day touting Cloud-features), and is streamed to your device. Of course it'll be limited to places with high speed cellular Internet, but hey 15 years ago no one thought we'd be able to stream 3D games over the Internet..

thekyle 7y ago
This is similar to AWS Workspaces but for mobile. The biggest concern is obviously privacy and security.

riyadparvez 7y ago

It seems very similar to Android feature called Google Play instant: https://developer.android.com/topic/google-play-instant https://developer.android.com/topic/google-play-instant.

adwww 7y ago
This (or something like it?) has been available for ages, but the only time I've ever actually encountered it in the wild is with links to a JIRA project.
- code_duck 7y ago
  Zillow has been one app I’ve seen using this - visiting their site resulted in an offer to use the app without installation.
- cryptoz 7y ago
  I think the Weather Channel does / did have an Instant App
- cglong 7y ago
  I have two: CBC News and Yahoo Finance. (You should be able to find them in the list of apps in Settings)
- holoduke 7y ago
  We have this instant app feature in our roadmap for more than 2 years. Every time we start with it, we run into the endless list of difficulties to get it to work. Max size, different modules, shares resources etc. It's hell on earth for most devs. That's why you see almost no apps having it. The idea is nice from a Google perspective. I would rather just add a link to each app in the playstore which goes to the app website. Up to the developer to create a web version of it. But of course this gives zero control to goole
- beatrobot 7y ago
  Vimeo has one
- eythian 7y ago
  A local news site uses it, however as that's in a (distant) second language for me, and I discovered their app doesn't let me select to copy-paste words into a translator, it wasn't useful. Probably just an issue with their app implementation however.
  - agustif 7y ago
    Screenshot -> OCR -> Translate
dheera 7y ago
These shenanigans make me wonder why they don't just focus on making HTML5 apps a better experience. If they provided better widgets (e.g. including swipe gestures, which Angular/Polymer/MDL don't) and access to native hardware we'd be set. HTML5 is just 100X easier and nicer to program with than that abomination of Android Studio followed by aligning, keysigning, and other steps. The HTML5 hello world is <html><body>Hello World</body></html> The native hello world is no less than 74 files of garbage, Gradle configurations, and other nonsense.
- diggan 7y ago
  It requires three things that are famously hard for Apple (and Google and many others too, not just Apple, to be fair) to achieve: - Work with others on standards - Expose things on a open platform that won't allow you to have full control over what's possible for developers and users to do and use - Admit that sometimes you're wrong and you have to change according to others
  - dheera 7y ago
    If all you want to do is deviate from standards on purpose, just change <html> to <apple_ml> and base64 encode the .html file (for no reason) and call the resulting file .iapp. Done. Standards broken. Proprietary status achieved with minimal effort. Change ".css" to ".bss" if you want to go the extra mile. and leave everything else as-is? Sounds like a win-win for both developers and biz dev.
    - giancarlostoro 7y ago
      This is partially what the Fitbit Ionic is doing actually hah.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > .bss Sadly already taken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.bss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.bss
      - 7y ago

rgovostes 7y ago

I guess not to be confused with Apple's Clips app which is for making short selfie videos. https://www.apple.com/clips/ https://www.apple.com/clips/

bnj 7y ago
For anyone with an iPhone who has never given this app a try, I recommend it-- it's surprisingly powerful and fun to use
- djrogers 7y ago
  Agree - just used it today to mash together 5 videos of my family saying happy birthday to my sisters. Worked great, and a really fun result.

jonawesomegreen 7y ago

Sounds like a great attack vector to me.

unnouinceput 7y ago
How?

diggan 7y ago

> this new API, we can say that it allows developers to offer interactive and dynamic content from their apps even if you haven’t installed them Also formerly known as Web Applications but now made by Apple with the added features of less control from the developers, a 30% mandatory fee if you accept any payments of any kind and locked to just one platform.

djrogers 7y ago
Nice snark, however web apps are still possible, and Android has a very similar feature (Instant - enabled by slices). Did you provide similar feedback when that was announced?
- lainga 7y ago
  Please, have curious conversation; don't cross-examine.
  - lowtolerance 7y ago
    I think it’s perfectly reasonable to question the degree to which bias plays a factor in one’s reception to just about anything.
- diggan 7y ago
  > Did you provide similar feedback when that was announced? I did not, as I'm a lot more bored at this point in time and also have a lot of more free time. But I do feel the same about both of the platforms movement towards "instant apps" that could have been equally solved by making web apps work better on respective platforms, instead of trying to solve the same problem again.
  - kllrnohj 7y ago
    > But I do feel the same about both of the platforms movement towards "instant apps" that could have been equally solved by making web apps work better on respective platforms, instead of trying to solve the same problem again. The web ecosystem has been trying to solve this for almost a decade now and has made relatively little progress. There's no reason to believe Apple could suddenly solve it in a few months if they just cared a little harder. Web components & shadow dom are approaching 10 years old and still have issues with framework & browser support. asm.js is 7 years old, yet the ideas birthed from it are still struggling. Effective parallelism is still largely nonexistent. RAM & CPU/GPU efficiency remain a bad joke, made worse by the entire world now running on battery power. A huge number of people are working on making web apps more viable, including people at Apple. It's not from a lack of trying at this point. The foundations are just all terrible & wrong for being an app platform. That's never what it was built or designed to be, and retrofitting that without breaking compatibility is really really difficult. If it turns out the incremental delivery benefits of the web can be retrofitted to an existing app platform more easily than the web can be retrofitted to be an app platform then... well, why not? The cross-platform-ish nature of the web was (and is) a great dream, but why can't that dream be realized by SwiftUI instead? Or Flutter? Or whatever? Why must it be web alone that gets to be that thing?

diebeforei485 7y ago

This is probably going to make iOS more bloated, but perhaps Apple could surprise us. If people swap out QR codes with malicious ones in real life, that could have all sorts of implications.

jamil7 7y ago
> If people swap out QR codes with malicious ones in real life, that could have all sorts of implications. This can already happen with a QR code and a website? I doubt these aren't going to be heavily sandboxed.

jonplackett 7y ago

This could be a real game changer. I think it might be part of the drive into AR Instagram and snapchat have ways to launch interactive experiences from a code and I’ve always thought Apple are missing a trick there. One of the biggest hurdles getting clients to make apps now is “no one downloads apps anymore” so this could make a huge difference and make more frivolous interactive experience work in apps again. I hope this happens soon.

layoutIfNeeded 7y ago

Considering that nowadays the average website is clocking in at dozens of megabytes of obfuscated JS and/or WebAssembly, I'm looking forward to lightweight and snappy native applets as an iOS alternative. Hopefully Apple enacts a hard limit on size.

anfilt 7y ago

Sounds like a horrible idea. Why on earth would I want the act of scanning a QR code to start downloading & executing random code. Heck native code too since they say it's an app.

Kuinox 7y ago
Well that what you are doing when you scan a QR code a put the URL in your browser. You download random code that the server send to you, and execute it.
spike021 7y ago
I doubt in practice it would be completely random. Most likely it would still need to be reviewed/verified by the App Store review board, and most likely it would still require asking for permissions just like any other app.

galuggus 7y ago

This looks similar to wechat mini programs. They are instants apps availible from within the chat app. They are very easy to share. They are a real game changer. E. G you go to a restaurant scan a qr code and order and pay through the mini program.

esmi 7y ago

Wouldn’t it be more surprising if Apple wasn’t working on something like this? Even if it is true, basically it sounds like someone leaked out a test build of something. They’re probably prototypes for all kinds of crazy things, some good some bad, just like everywhere.

habosa 7y ago

Android has Instant Apps. Not sure how others feel but I hate it. Compared to a website it's slower to load, harder to share, and outside of my normal flow. I guess it would be cool for a demo but I dunno. Also iOS apps are so large this won't be practical at all on cellular data.

kitsunesoba 7y ago
>Also iOS apps are so large this won't be practical at all on cellular data. They don't have to be. For example Tweetbot, which is a fully functional app, is only about 7MB. It's not hard to imagine that a single screen of an iOS app specifically optimized for space could be only a fraction as large – considerably smaller than the average site these days (10MB+).
- novok 7y ago
  They're big because of swift. Tweetbot is small because it's still only Objective-C.
  - kitsunesoba 7y ago
    That should be changing as more apps drop older iOS versions and stop bundling Swift.
    - jamil7 7y ago
      Exactly, an app of mine targeting iOS13+ weighs in around 2mb.

zoom6628 7y ago

MIUI has had this for a couple of years already. Leverages the Android feature for Google Play Instant as @esmi mentioned. I dont know how it works but effect appears to be a wrapper of sorts is setup for the app so the app itself does not get installed. Not all apps support this mode for reasons with which i am not familiar.

solarkraft 7y ago

This is going to be another Apple success story along the lines of: Yes, others have had this for years in theory, but nobody actually ever used it. Apple enter the market super late but instantly capture it fully because they're the only ones not monumentally sabotaging themselves.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mrtksn 7y ago

I have an app written in Swift and weights between 8-20Mb(depending on device and iOS version), which is not too far of from a typical website these days and the startup times are phenomenal(between 250-500ms, depending on the devıce). Writing in Swift is a delight and this is the feature I was dreaming about because having the user to install the App is not easy these days(100 impressions on Appstore Search would get me about 8 installs) however the people who install it are quite happy according to the feedback. I would imagine that the experience is similar to Apple's AR experience on Safari, which I feel can be improved but much nicer than opening the Appstore still. Let's hope that it's not too limited and can be possible to give a good feel to the user about the App's full functionality. The article talks about letting the dev to pick which part of the App would be presented but I suspect that the actual implementation would be similar to making an App Extensions - basically creating a separate mini-app that shares the codebase and the resources.

novok 7y ago
With Objective-C apps, it used to be even better, in startup and in app size. I think you can still get similar app size if you make a pure Obj-C app today.
- mrtksn 7y ago
  Before Swift become a thing I look at Objective-C but it was so irritating that I stuck with JavaScript. It's probably faster but what difference it would make to open the app faster than what the user can perceive? I can use static images to give the impression that the app is already running, which is recommended by Apple anyway since the user won't be able to react before the app is fully loaded anyway.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  On modern versions of iOS, the runtime ships with the system so even your Swift app can be hundreds of kilobytes to a few megabytes.
  - novok 7y ago

ianetaylor 7y ago

Is this like Microsoft Office 'click to run'?

madrox 7y ago

Every time I hear about things like this, I think about XKCD's take: https://xkcd.com/1367/ https://xkcd.com/1367/ We really are reinventing web pages on a regular basis

fxtentacle 7y ago

The reason why this is needed at all is because a todo list regularly needs 20 MB updates. The problem is that there is no incentive for developers to keep their apps small. And since Apple makes money from selling larger phones, they also have an incentive to tolerate bloat. And lastly, your provider will be happy to charge you astronomical fees for downloading that critical update over mobile data. There's nobody making money from small apps but 2 of 3 parties can monetize bloat. So bloated apps it is! The name Clips and the QR scanning suggests to me that this will be used for advertisements, like those AR overlays.

jamil7 7y ago
Well if the feature is successful and apple puts a hard limit on binary size for it then it might incentivise developers to ship less bloated apps.

BiteCode_dev 7y ago

So, apple don't want web app to be first class citizens and then reinvent web apps?

camdenlock 7y ago
The web is the biggest threat they face to their App Store. They see the writing on the wall with technologies like wasm blossoming, and with web APIs beginning to open up possibilities for “native”-quality apps. So they’re interested in anything that can reduce the friction necessary to get into native iOS apps.
- uthrowaway99 7y ago
  It's quite amusing to look back to iPhoneOS 1, where they doubled down on web apps without an AppStore.

luxuryballs 7y ago

Seems like a terminal, storing the content in the cloud like a container where the app lives up there instead of in your localhost, but still uses the native interface APIs.

acd 7y ago

This is common in Windows environments and is called app streaming / virtualization there. It’s been included in Enterprise editions of Windows feature called AppV. This must be something similar. App Store sales more profitable than iphone/iPad device flash size?

Someone 7y ago

They already have such a feature: on-demand resources (https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/FileManagement/Conceptual/On_Demand_Resources_Guide/index.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Fi...) The change seems to be that this allows all code to be downloaded on demand, not just scripts.

whoisjohnkid 7y ago

Hope the security around this is air tight. Otherwise this will definitely be a new attack vector hackers will be using to get malicious binaries running on your phone.

buboard 7y ago

looks like they are reinventing the web?

kkarakk 7y ago

Every app i've seen use this uses it to implement a "microsite". for eg nytimes made an instant app for the crossword puzzle on android... except if i'm into crossword puzzles i'll download the app anyways,why the hell would i download the instant app everytime unless it was part of my "flow" ie read the new york times paper and then the crossword is sent to my phone automatically or something? except i'd be reading the paper on my phone as well? the usecase for these kinds of things is so muddled and unclear i don't understand the point...