Google Exploring Tech That Lets People Use Apps Without Downloading Them

Google is offering a mobile users a way in which they can still enjoy using mobile apps but without needing to download them on their mobile devices. So how does this work exactly? To illustrate, here is a scenario: If a mobile user searches for hotels with the use of Google’s mobile app on a smartphone running on the tech giant’s Android mobile operating system, he will basically be offered search results from various sources around the Internet. However, the user will also see information displayed from mobile apps such as Hotel Tonight, for instance. If the user taps a button, Google will launch the mobile app so that the the user will be able to book a reservation, even if the user does not actually have the Hotel Tonight mobile app installed on his mobile device.

For certain, this setup appears to be more convenient, especially for mobile users who prefer not having to wait between downloading and installing a mobile app to finally launching it and actually using it. But Google is actually doing some misdirection in the background, specifically streaming a video to the mobile user’s handset from the web while the mobile app is running in a computer some miles away.

And also, there is one catch. As of now, Google can only do the trick with a total of 9 mobile apps, which include the aforementioned Hotel Tonight, Weather, New York Subway, My Horoscope, Daily Horoscope, Visual Anatomy Free, Useful Knots, the Gormey restaurant spotter, and Chimani, which provides guides for national parks. 9 mobile apps may seem a pretty limited number for now, but who knows -- if the setup finds enough early adopters, it could explode, eventually adding new apps, and even improving the speed of processing. 

As for mobile users, it offers a lot of benefits. For one, it eliminates the hassle of having to find a mobile app, download it, and install it before actually using it. Secondly, mobile users will have more space in their handsets for other things because no longer will mobile apps take up so much onboard memory. 

For Google, it might help put the focus back on the search giant instead of mobile apps when people do searches on the Internet. To be clear about, the Google desktop search engine is still, far and away, the biggest search engine in all of the world. But on mobile, Google the search engine is not as dominant as its desktop counterpart.