The App Problem
Apps are not things.
Originally written in 2014. Publishing now as a response to Dan Grover’s article about bots and messaging apps.
Nearly a decade has been spent building apps for mobile devices, but with Android Wear and virtual reality on the horizon, it’s a good time to rethink where they are headed. Back when the iPhone was first released, it didn't have support for third-party apps, but it was clearly designed with apps in mind, with default functionality shunted into several different apps. When other developers could finally build their own apps, they had to submit them to the App Store, where they were approved before the masses could enjoy them. In many ways, apps were a step backward from the applications that ran on PDAs.
The bait was that a phone operating system based on a “desktop” OS could put that same incredible functionality into the palm of your hand. It hasn't. Apps are not Unix programs that you elegantly chain together to accomplish daring file manipulations. In fact, the entire filesystem is opaque, with data supposedly sandboxed between apps. The freedom of the desktop is managed for us, because our thumbs, pecking for on-screen buttons, supposedly can’t handle the finicky details.
Apps really do reflect what they replaced. A music app could've been an MP3 player, a camera app could've been a digital camera, and a phone app could've been a phone. The smartphone’s claim to fame was to unify all that disparate functionality into a single object, but to do so, it had to destroy the user experience of having separate devices for separate tasks. Now we settle for visual imitations of the electronics they replaced.
It isn't a total regression. Our pockets and purses are lighter. A radio and a Apps are much more consistent than desktop applications — enough so that apps don't come with manuals. Downloading and installing doesn’t leave files strewn about, and uninstalling doesn't leave settings behind. Drivers are a thing of the past. Especially on Android, inter-app communication is encouraged, though still often implemented as an afterthought.
But it should be obvious from the name: apps are still just desktop applications with a few tricks. The biggest inkling of innovation can be found in the hubs on Windows Phone, which try to integrate the basic functionality of several apps into a single place. It offers a glimpse of what is possible if apps are no longer constrained to sharing files and links, like their desktop counterparts. Imagine a smarter smartphone.
Start with the Unix pipe. A photo filter shouldn't be constrained to an app, it should just be a filter that’s applied any time the camera is used. The ocean of messaging apps should be embarrassing when we have interoperable chat protocols. All messages should be searchable across networks. Even worse, there is no reason why each app should have its own version of a contacts list, we don't even have profiles for different users! Search is a sad affair on the iOS when compared to Spotlight in OS X, and there is a tremendous amount of potential if the phone is managing all the files in the first place!
Notifications work. Even though they belong to different apps, they come together in a nice stream of information, and they can be dealt with (on Android) without delving into the depths of an app. This is where Android Wear fits in so well, because a watch should not have to deal with the apps you have on your phone. But the possibilities should go on forever. Twisting the dial on your watch should change the volume of your music, and its screen should show what the phone camera sees in tight spaces.
How should we reinvent smartphones? Here’s my idea.
A smartphone interface should be focused on getting you off the phone with the information you need. At the center would be a stream of messages, each “app” serving as the gateway to retrieving them from different services. A phone call is just a message, pushed onto the stream when a call is received.
These messages could have priorities: a phone call, of course, is highest, while email sits lower, buzzing only once. A tweet or Facebook post would be lower still, never notifying you but simply sitting in your stream, waiting to be read. Google Now would be just below a phone call, telling you important information as you need it, but not demanding your attention. Imagine a unified inbox, for everything you get.
If the messages you receive are your inbox, you should also have a corresponding outbox, with the emails and comments you've sent. Conversation view would group the messages to and from a specific person. Of course, people are not messages, so some notion of static information is needed, which can be encapsulated in files! Games, of course, still exist as separate apps.
But what about other apps? Wouldn't it be cool if you could type the name of a song and hit play on the result? Even better if you didn't even have the song on your phone! A map, in this sense, is just a different way of visualizing search results. A calendar is a window into the future. Imagine how powerful they would be if they could aggregate all the data on your phone (without uploading onto some cloud service!). Your contacts would just be a layer on a map, while calendar events could be reminders to reply to messages you've received.
It’s information symbiosis. A task proven difficult by the failure of Chandler more than five years ago. But maybe we can finally, truly integrate all those devices we had years ago.
Let’s do crazy.
