How Apple Wrote the Future of Mobile Once More

The game-changing implications of inter-app linking and interactive notifications

The future of consumer technology is endlessly fascinating. It’s the reason why I started this blog in the first place. Advancements in this space are incremental in most cases, but once in a while, a giant like Apple writes an entirely new script. The recent WWDC is one of those times.

A new programming language, Continuity, and developer kits for Health, Home, and Cloud. These are all great, but it’s expected that the company would parlay its strengths in hardware-software integration as well as have a say in the cloud-connected devices trend. What really struck me in WWDC was the way Apple has answered the most difficult interface problems for the most important computing platform today: mobile apps.

There’s no more denying that apps have displaced the web as our primary access point to the internet. It is superior in terms of user experience, but it still lags behind the web in so many ways. Apple finally seemed to recognize that the app-centric world they spawned have inherent problems, and once again, they are putting the solution forward.

Up until this point, apps are no more than isolated little toolboxes, closed off from the web and other apps. Even Android with inter-app sharing has not nailed this problem down. Facebook Links is an interesting concept, but is still questionable in practice. In the WWDC, Apple showed the world how it should be done with inter-app linking.

Unlike simple ‘app jumping’, inter-app linking permits a continuous flow of actions over several apps all on the currently used app. With this, Apple is solving the problem of app overload. There are apps we use everyday, and apps that only take up space in the homescreen but we cannot delete because of one or two features we might need from them. With iOS 8, Apple is essentially introducing the app as plug-in model. It means that you could stash away a collage app in one folder and you’ll only be reminded that it exists when you have to stitch some pictures together for Instagram.

An equally huge announcement from Apple is interactive notifications. Limited iterations of this concept have already existed in Android, but Apple again blows the competition out of the water. It essentially puts widgets in the notification screen. This is huge for multitasking on mobile.

The Wired article Why Notifications Are About to Rule the Smartphone Interface hits the point home on why this is such a big deal:

When we can interact with our data in short bursts via notifications, we make remarkable efficiency gains, especially on tasks that we perform again and again.

This is in marked contrast to overly complicated multitasking solutions on mobile like Microsoft’s split-screen apps and Samsung’s overlay apps. With the small tasks in the notification shade, multitasking is just a matter of pulling down and swiping up. Elegant.

With inter-app linking and interactive notifications, there’s no longer a need to flit through so many apps. Imagine that you’re in an expense report app, and you want to convert the currency to dollars. Today, you have to close the expense app, open the currency converter app, type in the number again, get the result, go back to the expense app and finally type the converted number. In iOS 8, you could instead just pull down the notification shade and do a quick conversion, or even better, have a converter extension in your expense app.

There is an emerging hierarchy here. Apps for more immersive tasks, interactive notifications for quick actions, and extensions as additional features within the app. With over a million apps to choose from in the app store and hundreds installed on users’ devices, it makes sense to organize this way. Apple is sending a clear message here: Not all apps are created equal.

This has game-changing implications for the app ecosystem. In the Wired article: <quotes.> It means more complexity for developers, having to design not just the full app versions but also the Extension versions and possibly the widget version of their apps. It also demands challenging decisions for app publishers: how to aggregate or disaggregate apps in the most optimal way and how to maintain relevance for apps that have been relegated to widget or extension status.

For users, it’s an exciting new interaction paradigm. No need to go through the hassle of choosing among hundreds of apps for simple tasks. No need to go through the inefficiency of switching back and forth between apps. If each app is a cubicle, it’s as if Apple just laid out a tunnel that pierced through all those cubicles. It’s laying out the foundation for a frictionless mobile UI.

This is what excites me the most about these announcements. Apple has succeeded in solving the thorniest problems of apps without complicating the interface. It makes mobile even more viable as the new computing paradigm, making a stronger-than-ever case that it’s not just PC lite but PC plus. With the announcements in WWDC, Apple is sending a clear message: “We’ve figured it out. This is how computing should be done. The mobile interface as it’s meant to be.”