
Apple is developing a feature for using apps without requiring full downloads - djrogers
https://9to5mac.com/2020/04/09/ios-14-apple-developing-clips-feature-for-using-apps-without-requiring-full-downloads/
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riyadparvez
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
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.

~~~
eythian
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
Screenshot -> OCR -> Translate

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mrtksn
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.

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fxtentacle
It's hard to imagine, but some DOS apps had <100ms startup time on a 486 while
coming full-featured on a 1.44MB floppy disk.

I agree that your app is small and fast compared to what others are putting
out there, but compared to what software engineering could do if people cared,
this is still bloated and slow.

~~~
gear54rus
And it had 2 squares on the screen with 10 pixel letters inside them saying
'Proceed y/n'?

What kind of a comparison is that? People do care, it's just they care about
ease of use (not putting strain on your sanity) over some imperceptible
startup time difference or space difference on hard drives that get cheaper
every day.

~~~
fxtentacle
Nah, it was a full cashier system including a bar code scanner attached
through that big printer port.

I believe Circle K still uses pretty much the same UI, because that mouse-less
keyboard interface can be used efficiently with one hand.

Not everything needs to be pretty to work well.

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fxtentacle
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
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.

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habosa
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
>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
They're big because of swift. Tweetbot is small because it's still only
Objective-C.

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kitsunesoba
That should be changing as more apps drop older iOS versions and stop bundling
Swift.

~~~
jamil7
Exactly, an app of mine targeting iOS13+ weighs in around 2mb.

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esmi
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.

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galuggus
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.

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anfilt
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
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.

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jonplackett
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.

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zoom6628
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.

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kkarakk
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...

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Someone
They already have such a feature: on-demand resources
([https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Fi...](https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/FileManagement/Conceptual/On_Demand_Resources_Guide/index.html))

The change seems to be that this allows all code to be downloaded on demand,
not just scripts.

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netsharc
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
This is similar to AWS Workspaces but for mobile. The biggest concern is
obviously privacy and security.

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madrox
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

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acd
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?

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layoutIfNeeded
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.

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

~~~
camdenlock
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
It's quite amusing to look back to iPhoneOS 1, where they doubled down on web
apps without an AppStore.

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luxuryballs
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.

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whoisjohnkid
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.

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jonawesomegreen
Sounds like a great attack vector to me.

~~~
unnouinceput
How?

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solarkraft
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.

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ianetaylor
Is this like Microsoft Office 'click to run'?

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diebeforei485
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
> 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.

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diggan
> 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
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?

~~~
diggan
> 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
> 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?

~~~
simplify
> There's no reason to believe Apple could suddenly solve it in a few months
> if they just cared a little harder.

No, they really could just solve it. Progressive web apps are _so close_ to
being useful. Apple just refuses to make them user-friendly to install. Just
look at android for what's possible [https://web.dev/progressive-web-
apps/](https://web.dev/progressive-web-apps/)

~~~
kllrnohj
> Progressive web apps are so close to being useful

PWAs have been pushed since 2015. 5 years of perpetually being "so close to
being useful." And that's despite Google's _heavy_ promotion of them,
including building an entire OS around them.

~~~
diggan
PWAs are also actively worked _against_, at least from Apple. See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22686602](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22686602)
for a previous discussion

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buboard
looks like they are reinventing the web?

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rgovostes
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
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
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.

