iMessage Apps & Messaging
I was recently invited by @stestefanfan to present during the codeRIT Fall Leture Series on iMessage Apps — I decided to take my talk a bit outside of the technical realm, and here’s why:
As a cofounder of Dormillo, I live within the messaging space. For years now, I have lived and breathed messaging. I’ve used every messaging product, and follow every company in messaging, large and small.
To build the best messaging experience for our users at Dormillo, it is my job to understand the messaging ecosystem, the market, the trends, the use cases, and the users — each and every one of them, from Asian markets, to Latin countries, to here at home in the United States, I need to know them all, well.
I’m pretty confident that I do. And I’m confident that Apple does too.
I know why they are building a messaging platform.
I know who they are building it for.
I know the path they want to follow and the future they want to build.
And I know the ways in which messaging will become engrained in your daily — and how Apple will contribute to that behavioral and cultural shift.
It will take time, but messaging will become a larger influence in western culture, and it will define the progression of the growing world.
As someone who will soon be exiting academia with a degree in Computer Science, I am building my own career path in the messaging space.
But not every student is like me.
Most want to get a job in Software Engineering to gain experience, to have a satisfying career, and to some day become a manager, or even an executive.
That wasn’t the path for me.
But it will be the path chosen by many of the students who attended my talk.
I tailored my lecture to this audience by focussing less on the technical side of building iMessage apps and instead focussing on how messaging will reshape their world, and their future career.
It takes years of experience to build great apps for iMessage. One must understand the operating system, the development environment, the techniques instilled by Apple, and the frameworks that power a number of experiences. It was out of the question to instill years of knowledge into newcomers to the iOS ecosystem.
But I could give them the foundation to understand what they can build, what they should build, and what they will be able to build — I could instill in them a philosophy of a future less-spoken.
And I did.
The Internet has reshaped the career course of every single Software Engineer alive today.
The App Store has reshaped how consumers interact with and utilize software.
Touch has revolutionized the field of human-computer interaction.
Vocal computing has enhanced the lives of the inaccessible, the visually impaired.
Messaging-as-a-platform represents a paradigm shift of computing in which a second-layer, distributed operating system will become your Chief of Staff that follows you across device, across interactions, through time, and is at your will, each second, of every moment.
It represents the future of computing — and the future of a software-assisted humanity.
Apple is betting their operating system on iMessage.
My 30-minute talk explains the what, why, and the how of iMessage Apps, Stickers, and Messaging-as-a-platform:
