Slices are Android's new approach in showing remote content. Slices are UI templates that can display rich, dynamic, and interactive content from your app from within the Google Search app and also in other places like the Google Assistant. Slices can help users perform tasks faster by enabling engagement outside of the fullscreen app experience. Therefore, Slices are enhancements to App actions.

Over the years, Slices has brought revolution across the globe. It has reshaped the way we interact with apps on our phones. For instance, you could search for a video on YouTube or another streaming service and then play it right in the results, without ever leaving that screen. Instead of opening individual apps and then digging around to find info and perform actions, a simple, consistent system interface is needed to do it all. It is a whole new model of interaction with endless possibilities and enormous implications.

Google automatically renders the app name and the logo of the Play Store listing in the header of the Slice. A user can tap on the Slice to follow a deep link into the app if more information or additional interaction is needed. For example, when a user utters the phrase, “Check my bills,” then the banking app implements a custom slice that the Assistant displays. The command for Custom Slice depends on the back stack intents. Android Slices work best when a user asks for a small piece of information that can be displayed in a line or two of text.

Advantages of Android Slices

The first major advantage of using Slices is navigation to your app. Whenever a user starts to search for something your application can display content created by you. For example, the weather application opens when the user types weather in the search bar. Therefore, the user can jump right to your application just by tapping on the search result.

Actions

Interactive actions are the next major feature of Android Slices. A user can take action immediately in the required app just by clicking on Slice. Imagine a bank application that has a blocking credit card feature, the user knows it can be done, but first, launching the app and navigating to the proper screen needs to be performed to block the credit card. With Android Slices, the user just has to type "card" in Google Search and one of the results will be "Block Card". After clicking on it, proper action will be executed right in your application.

Discovery

You can use Slices to deliver your content when a user is looking for something similar your app can offer. For instance, let's take an application for cooking recipes. If a user is looking for 'pizza' in Google Search your app can easily show one of the pizza recipes from your app. Slices help users in discovering similar things.

Integration of Slices

The primary action for each Slice is defined while loading the content of the Slice. To indicate error conditions, the Sets error() method is used to let Google know that Slice content was not loaded successfully or that the user's request was not handled. For the content in Slices, Ads are not a part of Slices. The header and footer information is already provided by Google. Slice content should be completely focused on fulfilling the intent which means multiple intents with one Slice should be avoided. In-line user authentication in Google Assistant is not supported for App Actions. If users are permitting your app to show data via Slices, you can return an Error Slice at runtime for unauthorized users. The user is deep-linked to the correct screen in an app instead of the home screen. Therefore, Deep linking and Slices are correlated to each other.

How to Deep Link and Attribute with Android Slices

In android, a Deep link is a link that takes you to a specific destination within an app. Explicit and Implicit are the two kinds of deep linking. An explicit deep link is a single link that uses a Pending Intent to take the user to a destination. An explicit deep link can be a part of a notification or an app widget. When a user opens an app via an explicit deep link, the task back stack is cleared and replaced with the deep link destination. The starting destination is also added to the stack. Therefore, when a user presses the Back button from a deep link destination it navigates to the back stack just as though they entered your app from its entry point. Implicit deep link refers to a specific destination in an app. When a user clicks a link, then Android opens an app according to the destination for the user.

Android Slices offer an incredible experience from search to the app but it does not provide the ability to measure that performance. Right now, the attribution capabilities that accompany Android slices are non-existent, which makes it hard to know how this feature is impacting your user journey, installs, and conversions. However, there are some alternative ways. Integrating Branch links into Android Slices is one of them that enables you to seamlessly route users directly into your native app. This ensures a high-quality user experience that's measurable and attributable. Branch gives visibility into the performance of Android Slices.

App Actions and Android Slices are another way to increase user engagement with your app. If your app already supports deep linking, then getting basic App Actions integration is worth considering. The scale of adoption on these APIs is still unclear as they're so new. Slices are not publicly released and users cannot see them anywhere. Users can develop their own slices by following expert advice. Alfabolt can guide you well in this regard so book your free appointment today!

How to Deep-Link and Attribute Android Slices