AppSurfer

» see appsurfer.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

AppSurfer ran Android in a data center and streamed the screen to your browser. You clicked an app and it booted somewhere else, then you poked at it through a web page without installing anything. The team called the idea DroidCloud before it had a product name. Four engineers from Pune built it: Aniket Awati, Ratnadeep Deshmane, Amit Yadav and Akshay Deo, under a company called RainingClouds Technologies.

The problem AppSurfer attacked was a real one where I live. Android phones sold in Turkey around 2013 shipped with small storage and arrived attached to metered data, so installing something to find out whether it was worth keeping cost you twice over. I still never ran into AppSurfer, because its consumer side lived as an embeddable widget sitting on developer pages and app directories rather than as a place you went. It was plumbing for other people's download buttons.

Google I/O opened on 18 May 2016 with Android Instant Apps, which split an app into modules and fetched only the piece you had asked for, handled by the platform itself. The farewell went up on 1 June, fourteen days later. It is unusually clear-eyed for the form, saying straight out that the problem had been solved in a big way and that competing with that was not going to happen.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the four versions ~

Version one launched in early 2013 as try-before-download, with a portal for users and free demo widgets for developers who wanted a Try Now button on their own pages. That is the version TechCrunch wrote up in October 2012 and the one that pulled in 8,000 developers and 40,000 apps. Version two tried to charge for it, selling the demo widgets to developers on tiered pricing, and the revenue was real but small.

Version three turned the technology into a try-and-install ad format for app advertisers, which tested well and arrived just as the money ran out in early 2014, right before the Indian funding boom started. What the team did next deserves recording: they took consultancy work for other companies and spent the proceeds on keeping their own product moving, until there was enough banked to ship version four. That was the one that streamed a cloud Android instance to a phone on demand, launched in beta in the US and Europe, and shown at DroidCon SF.

~ the thing google built ~

The farewell note contains a line that explains the whole company in nine words: two of our products eventually got built by Google itself. The try-before-you-install demo became a Play Store feature, and the stream-it-instead-of-installing-it idea became Instant Apps. Both times the platform owner could do it more cheaply, because splitting an app into modules requires control of the app format and AppSurfer only had control of a browser window.

Android Instant Apps was removed from Google Play in December 2025, nine years after it closed this company, on the grounds that usage and engagement had been low. The feature that made AppSurfer impossible ran for eight years and was then retired for lack of interest.

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