Another one for the Google graveyard. The tech giant is set to discontinue its Instant Apps feature, officially shutting down the service in December 2025. While the concept held promise, it ultimately arrived too late to gain significant traction among users or developers.
What Were Google Instant Apps?
Introduced in 2017, Google Instant Apps aimed to bridge the gap between the mobile web and native applications. The core idea was to allow users to access and interact with a portion of an Android app’s functionality instantly, simply by clicking a web link, without the need for a full download and installation. This was particularly appealing in the earlier days of mobile, when mobile websites were often sluggish compared to dedicated apps. Google envisioned providing an app-like experience with the speed and accessibility of the web. The feature later expanded to include games.
You might still see this feature listed in your phone’s settings under “Google Play Instant.”
Why Did Instant Apps Fail?
Despite being a “good idea,” several factors contributed to Instant Apps’ minimal adoption and eventual demise:
- Timing: By 2017, when Instant Apps launched, mobile web browsers and technologies had significantly improved. The gap in performance and usability between mobile websites and native apps had narrowed considerably, reducing the unique utility of an “instant” app experience.
- Low Developer Adoption: This was arguably the biggest hurdle. Developers were required to create a special, modularized version of their app specifically for the Instant Apps platform. This version also had a strict size limit, initially 4MB before being raised to 15MB. This additional development effort and technical constraint proved to be a “steep climb,” especially since it only targeted a subset of potential new users. Google has historically struggled to incentivize developers to adopt some of its new platform features, a pattern seen across various initiatives.
- Limited User Awareness and Use Cases: Because developer uptake was minimal, most users rarely encountered Instant Apps in the wild. The feature remained largely unknown or unused by the general public.
- Evolving Mobile Landscape: As mobile apps became increasingly similar to their corresponding mobile websites, and with the rise of alternative technologies and evolving user behaviors, the need for an “instant” app layer diminished.
As one analyst wryly noted, the feature’s lack of integration with buzzworthy tech like generative AI probably didn’t help its long-term prospects in Google’s strategic thinking.
Joining the Google Graveyard
The discontinuation of Instant Apps is just the latest addition to a long and growing list of Google products and services that have been shut down over the years – often referred to as the “Google Graveyard.” This pattern of launching, iterating, and eventually retiring services is a characteristic of Google’s development cycle.
Over the years, popular services like Google Reader (RSS), Google Talk (messaging), iGoogle (customizable homepage), and more recently, Google Podcasts, the VPN by Google One, and even certain Chromecast models and Google Assistant features, have been sunsetted. This history highlights Google’s willingness to experiment but also its tendency to discontinue projects that don’t achieve critical mass, align with current strategic priorities, or face internal competition – a pattern observed even within single product categories like messaging apps.
The Quiet Announcement
The news of Instant Apps’ impending shutdown wasn’t shared via a major public announcement. Instead, confirmation was discovered buried within a warning message in a beta version of Android Studio, Google’s developer environment. The notice states that “Instant App support will be removed by Google Play in December 2025. Publishing and all Google Play Instant APIs will no longer work.”
Given its limited popularity over its eight-year lifespan, the shutdown in December 2025 is unlikely to impact many users directly. For most, accessing content will simply continue via the standard mobile web browser. Instant Apps remains a classic example of a technically interesting idea that struggled with timing, developer buy-in, and user adoption, ultimately finding its place among the many services Google has retired.
