It was a streamed app you could get from web sites and stuff. It was stupid and made little sense.

App Clips. I’ve used these several times to pay for meals at restaurants. Those use Local for Toast. QR code on bill. Scan it. Check the items. Add the tip. Pay with Apple Pay. I eventually installed the app, but I think it still uses the clip interface instead of opening the app. Did it for parking once too, different app. My local Sunoco also has App Clip tags at the pumps, but I don’t need those. Definitely a self-serve deal in my experience. I’d see more if I went out more often.

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-app-clips-iphb3a73ec53/ios

I just tried a bunch of apps that I swear used to have it, it all of them just say "Open in the real app" now. I wonder if low usage here also means developers stopped using them.

Basically what would happen is you'd click a link to Instagram, and instead of opening a web page, it would open the Instagram "app" instantly. If you then tried to do anything more advanced in the app (advanced decided by the developer) it would prompt you to install the app.

I believe vimeo used it when you tried to watch a video on their site, it worked well.

I remember some video service using it, Vine I think? Also remember some news sites supporting it but its been far too long since I used chrome lol

@Skyline Lime had it (probably still has it). I used to rent a Lime scooter just by choosing "try app". I would then enter the scooter code manually, and I could freely ride how much I wanted. It worked all the time. I'm no longer using this feature, as I have a new phone with a bigger storage, where I installed the Uber app, so whenever I would try the same way it would prompt me to use the Uber app to unlock the scooter.@fne8w2ah

I think you're probably the first person in years to do that.

Ah, so that's how they finally got the usage metric

So how the OS already catches links to e.g. YouTube and offers to open it directly in the app, it could also do that for apps that weren't installed and it'd just download and run them automatically. One of the examples was Vimeo, instead of loading the website it'd download a cut down variant of the normal app and load the video in that instead.

The idea was to push people towards using apps instead, but now Google control the web they can just make that their app store instead, so native apps aren't as relevant anymore.

Any app can be a bloated web page with or without pwa.

Instant apps were a really cool concept that never got traction because documentation was negative - those cases where every single bit of information you find, most of it is outdated and the updated one, if exists, is not to be found.

Many times since the beta release I had discussions about these, and I've known people seasoned in Android native trying to pull off a basic proof of concept and unable to get started.