Streaming Apps?

          For quite a while now, streaming has been a pretty big thing. Streaming has been around since the dawn of YouTube at the beginning of the 21 century, the streaming of Netflix or Amazon Prime movies/T.V shows, or streaming music such as Pandora, Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play Music, Soundcloud....yeah, the list of companies that allow streaming of digital content is almost endless! Almost any consumable medium can be streamed...except apps.
          Apps, since the dawn of the Apple App store in 2008, have required the user to go to the App Store of choice, click download, sometimes prompting for a password, enter the password, wait for the app to download and then install, and then open the app to finally do what the user wanted to do. Doesn't sound like that much work, but its a hassle for some. If I go to facebook.com on my phone, I want it to seemlessly open an interface that I can use Facebook on, not prompt me to,"Click here to install our mobile app, then, after its downloaded 40MB a few minutes later, you can open it, then enter your sign in credentials, and then finally, if you can remember what you were doing, go do it!". Hence, we have mobile sites (such as m.facebook.com), but these mobile sites, while vastly improved over the dawn of the mobile internet era, are still not as great as their app equivalents due to web browser limitations. There has long been the need for a middle ground between a crippled web user interface, and the need to download apps that may only needed for a one-time use scenario, such as if I were to book a hotel, but not feel obligated to download Travelocity's app just for one night booking of a room. This is where Google's new innovation steps in: streaming apps.
          Streaming apps would be made possible by Google's remote cloud servers running layers of virtualization to basically run the app in the cloud, and then send the data to the user. However, this method of delivery does require a strong WiFi connection, as the responsiveness of the app is heavily dependent on the data transfer speeds, but also low latency, something that is hard to acheive on a mobile network in all areas. If a fast network weren't available, the streaming app concept would crumble, as there would be too much delay between a user's touch action and the animations and transitions of the app.
          Overall, I love the concept, and I hope Google implements it within a lot of apps soon. While I think it makes no sense to stream apps such as games quite yet, though Nvidia has commited to the idea with its Shield console and streaming games, I believe that streaming small apps that will only be used once or twice in a long while is more worthwhile, such as Hotwire, for spontaneous hotel bookings. I look forward to this project moving forward in the future: who knows, maybe one day, every app will be streamed!

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