“What if you could use ten times a many apps without stopping to download all of them?” ask Michael Siliski, the Google product manager who’s overseeing the Instant Apps effort.

At its annual Google I/O conference this week, Google unveiled what it calls Instant Apps—a new breed of software app that arrives on your phone almost instantly without a lengthy download. The trick is that these Instant Apps are in fact tiny slivers of a larger app that handle very small and particular tasks—such as panning through a 360-degree photo.

When you get, say, that text with the 360-degree 3D photo of the kombucha brewery and tap it, the Instant App will just open, much as webpage would open via an ordinary URL. But what comes next will do more than a webpage—at least in theory. The technology underlying Instant Apps takes advantage of “deep linking,” a wider effort to link to and among apps in much the same way link tie together webpages.

You could still download the full app, if you like. But you don’t have to. If you happen to need the same Instant App in the near future, it may open even faster the second time, since Google plans on caching these app slivers in memory, at least for a while. “Our goal is to have everything be as fast as possible while using as little space as possible,” says Kirk patrick, an engineer who has worked on Android since before the project was acquired by Google.

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