Product Teardown 18 — Call/Contact/Messaging Apps on Apple, Google and Smartisan

It’s very obvious that for a phone, the killer app is making phone calls. People mainly use three apps to make their calls: call, contact and messaging apps. These three apps are small but very important apps on the phone. If Facebook messenger sucks, you wouldn’t blame phone manufacture. But if any of those three apps sucks, it would make you think that the phone manufacture really sucks. Small but very important apps.

In this post, I am going to analyze phone call apps from three developers, Apple, Google, and Smartisan. I must admit that which ever developer it is, they make good phone call apps. Their apps sever the basic needs of users. They are really competing on micro innovations.

Product Features

Making calls / Adding a contact / Call history / Favorite

I like Apple and Smartisan call app more than I do Google’s call app. Inside call app, the most important task for users is to find a person and make a call, or input a number and make call.

Apple and Smartisan manage this very well. In app, you see key pad, contacts, call history and favorite. You can finish all your work in this app.

Google’s call app is also great. Google makes key pad a floating button, instead of putting it in the same category with favorite, history and contacts.

I am not against any design. But at the same time, I could come up with a strong reason why Google make key pad this way. Maybe just to look different from Apple?

Harassment number screening

This is a feature that many Chinese smartphone OEMs have. The phone can automatically screen harassment calling number and label it. So if you miss a call, you see the number is labeled and you don’t need to call back.

The reason Apple and Google don’t do this is because their products are shipped all over the world. They need to work with carriers or 3rd party solution providers in each country to implement this feature. I think from their perspective, it’s not cost effective.

Messaging

Smartisan is clearly the winner of messaging app. There are two great features that make Smartisan stand out.

1) Cancel a SMS within 4 seconds of having press “Send” button

This is a great feature. If you mistakenly send out a SMS, either a wrong message, or to wrong people, you can cancel this message within 4 seconds. This feature is great not because users would use this feature very often, but because it solves users’ problem. When users really this, it just works great!

2)second great feature is “swipe right to delete, mark as unread, favorite”

If we compare solutions from Apple, Google and Smartisan, Smartisan undoubtedly has the right features and implements in the right way.

In Apple’s messaging app, you cannot mark a SMS as unread. Sometime, people send me a message, I read it and know I need to follow up. In that situation, I really want to mark that message as unread so that I can be reminded that I have some messages that I need to respond.

Google has this feature, as well as another great feature “stick on top”. But Google trade off effectiveness with efficiency.

In Google’s messaging app, users can select multiple SMS, then do delete, favorite, mark as unread. In this way, users can deal with multiple messages at the same time.

Smartsian, on the other hand, prioritize effectiveness over efficiency, under the assumption that users are more likely to mark individual SMS as unread or favorite, instead of doing so for multiple SMS.

As a result, in Smartisan, users can swipe each SMS to right, mark it or delete it. If users do want to delete multiple messages, they can long press the message, then choose the ones they want to delete, just like Google’s way.

I think both Google’s and Smartisan’s are great features and design. But I personally like Smartisan’s way. From a user’s perspective, it is just more convenient.

You might argue that Google’s design has a better UI/UE consistency. Just long press, then you have all the functions, while in Smartisan ,you either long press or swipe right.

Logically, Google’s way sound reasonable, but in real life, I still love Smartisan’s way of doing that.

Again, both of them are great products, better than Apple.

How we can make phone call apps better

a) Benchmark the best practice. Just learn from Smartisan.

b)Automatically send a message if you don’t have a voice mailbox. Many people don’t have voice mailbox. Sometimes they miss a call and the other side don’t know why. This feature will automatically send a message if you don’t have voice mailbox and miss a call. For example, a pre-wrote message could be like this: “Sorry I don’t have a voice mialbox. I will call you back.”

c)Send a pre-wrote message when you reject a call. If you are in meeting, a call comes but you cannot take it, it’s better to reject the call and send a message such as “Sorry in a meeting, will call you back”. Uses probably don’t need a lot pre-wrote messages, but just a few will do the work. It’s even better to allow users to customize their own call rejecting message.

d)Automatically extract verify code. If you use SMS to verify your account, you would need a code. It would be easier for users to get this verification code automatically and directly paste into the verification box.

e) Select part of the SMS. User can copy, paste, and forward SMS. It would be better that users can select which part of SMS they want to copy, so they don’t need to edit in send window.