Will Android Instant Apps Kill the Smartphone Flagship Tradition?

The best of the Google I/O 2016 I’ve known is the Android Instant Apps. As we have seen in the past, Instant Apps load like a website on the android devices with Jelly Bean and above without being installed.

The Google’s intention of making the user access the app in a very few click as possible can be achieved. But this will show some side effect on the smartphones’ flagship configurations.

Wondering how? Read more..

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During 1GB RAM times, the smartphones are considered to be great with such a lot of physical memory on board. Later, with the next versioning of the Android operating system, the necessity for more physical memory has also been increased.

The reason is the OS alone started consuming a lot of memory, say 1GB at least to run. If a device had 2GB of RAM, the rest of the 1GB is used for the apps. This is a very close situation to those 1GB RAM devices of the past but masqueraded by the on-paper specification of 2GB RAM on board.

With only 1GB left for apps, one cannot use more than 5-6 apps on the device as they occupy it to run some background services always. This couldn't satisfy the hunger for more apps. By the way, one can install as many apps as one can until the ROM fills in.

Later with the launch of smartphone startup companies and their new flagship devices with 3GB and 4GB RAM on board has satisfied the hunger of having more apps on the phone. Smartphones like OnePlus One and Asus Zenfone 2 have set some standards in the industry for flagship for their competitors.

Now let’s get back to the story;

Those 2GB RAM devices are good enough to run web browsers on the devices and they are good for running some apps with exclusive usage of system resources. Instant apps, as we know are not necessarily be installed on the device, can run without any lag as the code and services will be loaded in a modular basis from the Google servers.

Does this give you any catch?

If that happens, what’s the need of having powerful flagship devices spending hundreds of dollars. The smartphones flagships in different pricing scales that are available now would have to come down with the prices. Don’t you think?

Android Instant Apps & Smartphones Flagship Tradition

It is not always about the on board memory. Flagship includes new hardware and new processors. Some processor needs most of the memory to give their best in performance.

If we take an example of Asus Zenfone 2 with Intel Atom processor, it would consume more RAM than the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. So, it’s not just the apps and other software that consume the memory it’s the processor capability too.

Google have already invited the developers to include the instant app modules in their future apps and upgrade the old ones. That means, the new apps might not need any new hardware specifically.

On the flipside, some application with heavy graphics like games cannot be instantiated. Because they need real resources from the native device to run smoothly. To run applications of that kind, we might need the flagship tradition to go on.

Android apps that can be instantiated would be the shipping apps, paying apps, particular shops, or product apps for checkout, news apps, information apps, form filling apps, inquiry apps, and some social media apps.

Apps like games and graphics applications might not be possible to instantiate. So, we would need the flagships for those that cannot be made Instant apps.

Android Instant apps might not kill the flagship tradition completely but might slow down its rate for budget category phones.

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