My phone just randomly started installing "instant apps" by itself even though my settings are explicitly set to not auto download update anything. It's not even visible in my installed apps to remove. After a quick search it seems like Google is forcibly rolling out a new feature. If I wasn't looking at my phone I wouldn't have known. Thanks for eating my mobile data.

Happened with me too at about same time, saw google play installing instant apps but there is no launcher icon. They are implementing google instant apps functionality through this install to run partial instant apps without installing full apps.

@mrtnrdl galaxy s8+ but it's Google that's the trouble maker

What are instant apps, could someone elaborate me?

@Wack Android Instant Apps lets users experience beautiful and immersive apps, with material design and smooth animations, without installing them on their devices.

Source: https://developer.android.com/topic...

Its like you can launch an android app native activity from any website itself onclick without installing app on your device.

Instant Apps are small lightweight modules/parts of full apps that only exist for an Instant on your device.

I've seen that used for news apps when you try to read an article on their mobile website, they redirect you to an Instant app.

So it's not "installed", not related to your auto-updates etc.

But you can disable this : in Settings/Google/Instant Apps.

@freedev && @Arumenn so... i visit a url, using Chrome, instead of showing me the bloddy website, it will "download" some part of their app in a "temp" folder, launch it, display that site (possibly with additional stuff) in itand if I close it, removes that code again?

So first off all: wtf? If I visit a website, I choose not to get the app, but use the website instead

Second: what about bandwith for downloading it every time? (Sure there will be some caching but whatever). What about sessions? Maybee I had a cookie to keep me signed in on the (mobile) website.

Third: so... Some website, can run as native kind of app and access every thing? Like camera, position, stuff? Isn't that a big security hole? Sure a "normal" website won't do such stuff, but if they get hacked?

Maybee I'm getting the concept wrong or have a wrong idea, but currently it sounds like a pretty bad idea to me...

Their goal is usually just about app discovery, converting you to their full app by using a demo/part of it.

That was, devs only have to develop 1 thing : the app. The website would just redirect to an instant app or the full app if it's already installed.

From that point of view, it's less work and less stuff to manage.

From a user's point of view : it's just confusing.

As for permissions : they use the runtime permissions model introduced in Android 6.0.

I see. Well they'll probably still have a responsive website, as there are other OS out there, so... But yeah app discovery, I'll give them that.

@freedev Welcome! 🙌🙋

@linuxxx thank you