In the future, streaming content from remote servers may become the norm. Gamers can already take advantage of cloud-based platforms that do all the tricky calculations on a powerful server before sending the video frames over the Internet to their device, negating the need to buy a powerful gaming computer. Now, Google has made this system work for Android apps, albeit in a limited form.
The company’s latest experiment inside the Google Now app lets users stream an app from its servers to their phone if one is available that would enhance their search query. For now, only a limited line-up is available as Google tests the beta version of the feature with a “small group” of partners.
Essentially, the contents of Android apps have been indexed so they can be displayed in search results. When a user makes a search in the Google app and a result is produced which originates from an app, it is delivered over the Internet to the user’s phone, regardless of whether they have it installed.
The user can press buttons and scroll through menus. The input is then sent to the server which figures out what to do with it and sends back a video feed of the app’s output. Google’s own explanation likens it to streaming a video from YouTube.
Rajan Patel, the director of the team leading Google’s app indexing project, told TechCrunch that the app is loaded in a virtual machine on Google’s cloud. He explained: “The app loads in a virtual machine on Google’s cloud platform, and the client – the Google app that runs on your phone – sends up the touch interactions to the cloud machine. And that cloud machine executes those touch interactions, renders the app and sends the pixels back down to the client.”
Google has been working on indexing apps for two years, creating more than 100 billion deep links into services including Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest in that time. The idea of adding app content to search results and letting users interact with a web-based version of the original product may seem strange at first but Google has its reasons for doing so, beyond just obtaining access to as much data as it possibly can.
There are practical advantages to indexing and streaming apps, particularly outside of the U.S. where it is more common to find apps containing information that is not also available on a companion website. In this case, a person without the app installed is missing out on information that could be the answer to their query, just because it isn’t also available online.
Even within the U.S., this issue persists. Two of the launch partners for the project are a national parks app called Chimani and an app for the New York Subway.
They both offer information which is likely to be very useful to people searching for “national park” or “New York subway” online but until now their content has remained hidden to everyone who hasn’t already installed the app. Now, searching for those terms from Android will display a blue link to stream the app, giving more users access to the content directly from a familiar search page and without forcing them to install the product.
Ars Technica says streamed apps usually respond well when on a decent Internet connection and there “isn’t a huge difference” in performance between an installed app and its streamed variant if you’re just tapping buttons. Lag only becomes perceptible when scrolling or changing direction as the frames begin to blur together and the server fails to keep up with the interactions.
There are currently limitations with the system. You need to be in the U.S. and have a phone running Android Lollipop to start with but Google also warns you can only stream apps when on Wi-Fi because of the large amounts of bandwidth used. Regardless, the feature is another interesting look into the future of accessing content that will increasingly be stored away from your own device.
