The ONE feature I miss from my Android
And what it means for Apple’s future
I used a Nexus 5 for several months this past year (switching back to an iPhone simply because I started working on an iPhone app for my company Quibb)
I took a trip back to my hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia in October. It was not under the best of circumstances (my grandmother suddenly passed away ☹), but I managed to enjoy the time back home — spending lots of time with my family, visiting my best friend’s craft beer bar for the first time since it opened, fun morning walks with my dog, and checking out the local startup incubator. It turned into a fairly eventful trip.
I’m not an overt photo-sharing type of person, even though I constantly take photos on trips like this. During the 10d of my trip I ended up taking just shy of 100 photos. None of those photos from the trip ended up on Facebook or Instagram. There were probably a couple of SnapChats sent, but that’s all you could bucket under ‘sharing of visual communication’ for the trip.
So… what happened to all those photos? In theory, nothing was going to happen to them. They were DOA and locked inside my camera roll. If, by chance, I happened to browse through them at some point in the future — great, I’d probably enjoy looking at them solo, maybe showing one to a friend. Perhaps they’d show up via Timehop. But otherwise, it was unlikely that they’d be seen by anyone else.
But instead, something magical happened. Something that caused me to share and email lots of photos from my trip with my friends and family, and to whip out my phone to show people about my trip. What happened?
Google built me an album.
It was amazing, I loved it. The cute maps, highlights of locations I’d visited, the layouts, the lame ‘Trip to Halifax’ title was even okay. Compared to the baseline (remember — DOA on my roll), they were now sharable and enhanced, and made me and my trip look awesome.
I took another trip last weekend, this time to Scottsdale Arizona to visit my dad. It was another eventful trip — my first time seeing real desert landscape, cruising along Route 66, unexpected run-ins with lizards, my dog being hospitalized (he’s okay now, thanks), driving through the Santa Ynez valley on the way home, etc. But when I got home, a funny thing happened. I was actually sad that I had an iPhone, and that I didn’t get a fancy magical album created. While I know I could get one by manually creating one with some album app, having a camera/photos app installed that does something similar, or perhaps using a Google+ camera/photos app (?), the effort and lock-in of the current iPhone camera as my default ‘This is how I take photos’ is far too high of a bar. The output of my iPhone for this trip was severely lacking.
If Google can keep creating amazing, magical experiences like the one they’ve pulled off with this auto-album feature — an experience that’s clearly 10x better for this particular use case— Apple really needs to think about how they’ll continuing pushing the limits of their default software. They can continue to own the platform and default apps, pushing innovation out to 3rd party apps — but at what point will their core experiences eventually fall behind?
