Light, Camera, Actions
Actions are a new way to make your app’s capabilities and content more accessible, so that people can easily get to it at the right moment. App Actions will appear to users based on usage and relevance, across multiple Google and Android surfaces, such as the Google Search App, the Play Store, the Google Assistant, and the Launcher.
Why App Actions-
Re engagement is a challenging problem in Android. A survey on Google shows that 77% of users don’t use an app after 3 days of installing it and this number increase up to 90% after a month.
How Actions will solve re engagement issue-
Actions will help app to be discovered in more places across multiple Google and Android surfaces. Your Actions can appear in the Android launcher, Smart Text Selection, the Google Search app, the Google Assistant, and the Play Store.
How Actions work-
Google provides a rich, ever-growing catalog of common intents. You can associate capabilities and content in your app to the intents in this catalog or define your own custom intents.
For all these intents deep semantic understanding has been build.Google will map search query in google assistant or google search app to a built in intent( if available) using Deep semantic Natural language processing.
For example- whenever user type “book cab to times square”(or something similar text ) in google search (or other Actions integrated product), google parse them and map them to built in intent. This intent have action id “ORDER_RIDE” and location parameter times square, now this intent will be passed to android app which will directly take user to order ride page and user can request ride in single click.
Actions are not restricted to android P, available on all devices with the latest version of google apps supporting actions(Assistant,launcher,playstore).
Note:- Conversational actions are also available to build voice powered experience.
Before going into how to implement them in app ,we will first discuss about use cases of app actions in google products.
Integration example of App actions in Google products-
- Android launcher-
In Android N launcher screen predicted app row was introduced based on user previous app opening behaviour.Now Along with apps Actions are also added on launcher screen itself.
These predicted actions are based on user routines,App sequences and context(location,in car,headphone).That will help user to re engage with installed apps.
- Android Smart Text Selection
Actions are integrated in smart Text Selection.Whenever we tap on some text in any app screen along with Clipboard intent like copy,Share and paste if a action intent is present it will also be shown as in below pic.
Selected text is processed on onDeviceMachineLearning model to map into built in actions and now all the apps fullfilling this actions will be shown to user.So this is fully secure because the processing will be done on user device itself.
- Playstore
Actions are also available on Playstore. Whenever user search for anything in playstore user will get action suggestion from installed app as well from not installed apps.If app is not installed then app detail page will be opened on playstore and after installation corresponding actions screen will be opened. - Assistant and Search
Actions will allow assistant to directly open app for task oriented queries.It will also show app suggestions for content seeking queries.In search app also with other site and app suggestions directly task oriented app suggestions will be available.
That’s all about what is android action and how this works in android platform and apps.
In the next article we will discuss about “How to integrate actions in app”.
Also Checkout following posts in android.
