Introducing Android Instant Apps SDK 1.1

Jichao Li, Software Engineer; Shobana Ravi, Software Engineer

Since our public launch at Google I/O, we've been working hard to improve the developer experience of building instant apps. Today, we're excited to announce availability of the Android Instant Apps SDK 1.1 with some highly-requested features such as improved NDK support, configuration APKs for binary size reduction, and a new API to maintain user's context when they transition from an instant app to the installed app.

Introducing configuration APKs

For a great instant app experience, app binaries need to be lean and well structured. That's why we're introducing configuration APKs.

Configuration APKs allow developers to isolate device-specific resources and native libraries into independent APKs. For an application that uses configuration APKs, the Android Instant Apps framework will only load the resources and native libraries relevant to the user's device, thereby reducing the total size of the instant app on the device.

We currently support configuration APKs for display density, CPU architecture (ABI), and language. With these, we have seen an average reduction of 10% in the size of the binaries loaded. Actual savings for a given app depend on the number of resource files and native libraries that can be configured.

As an example, a user on an ARM device with LDPI screen density and language set to Chinese would then receive device-agnostic code and resources, and then only get the configuration APKs that have ARM native libraries, the Chinese language, and LDPI resources. They would not receive any of the other configuration APKs such as the x86 libraries, Spanish language strings, or HDPI resources.

Setting up configuration APKs for your app is a simple change to your gradle setup. Just follow the steps in our public documentation.

Persistent user context after installation

On Android Oreo, the internal storage of the instant version of the app is directly available to the installed version of the app. With this release of the SDK, we are enabling this functionality on older versions of the Android Framework, including Lollipop, Marshmallow, and Nougat devices.

To extract the internal storage of the instant app, installed apps can now call InstantAppsClient.getInstantAppData() using the Instant Apps Google Play Services API and get a ZIP file of the instant app's internal storage.

Check out our code sample and documentation for more details on how to use this API.

Start building your Android Instant App

It's simple to start building your instant app on the latest SDK. Just open the SDK Manager in Android Studio and update your Instant Apps Development SDK to 1.1.0. We can't wait to see what instant app experiences you build with these new features.