Product Teardown 19 — Clock on Apple, Google and Smartisan

Honestly speaking, I am not sure I am going to write a post for clock app. It seems not a good investment of time. Clock app is a simple app and people use it quite often. Also, you don’t hear a lot of complains for clock. After all, if the app does its job, why bother.

After carefully comparing the apps on Apple, Google and Smartisan, I changed my mind. So in this post, I am going to analyze the clock app from these three developers. I will make this post short.

First Appearance

Apple has the best first appearance, color, font, clock design, etc. All the information is organized very well. Smartisan clock is great as well. I also like it show the time in numbers.

Google clock, however, looks just ugly. 21:45, current time, draws too much attention from this world clock page. I don’t believe this is Google’s best work. It’s something you expect from an intern with bad attitude.

If Google can just changes the design of pages inside clock, it will make leaps and bounds of improvements.

The reason why Google has such a bad clock app, I think, is that this app is not regarded as important as other apps inside Google. They just don’t care too much.

Features

It’s not easy to improve something that already serves users’ needs well. And it’s not easy to do that in an elegant way. Fortunately, we see Smartisan took on this challenge, and did a very nice job.

No Alarms on Holiday

Many people set a repeat alarm but always forget to turn it off for holidays. Smartisan has this great feature called “no alarm on holidays”. If you select it, your alarm won’t ring on holidays.

It’s a sweet feature.

Turn Off A Recursive Alarm or Not

What if you want to turn off alarm for tomorrow but are afraid that you might forget to turn it on again after tomorrow? Many people actually have this problems.

Smartisan has another nice feature: when you turn off a recursive alarm, it will ask you “do you want to turn off for tomorrow”, or “turn off this recursive alarm”.

This is not an innovative idea. Outlook also has this feature. If you want to delete a recursive calendar invite, if will ask you to choose to delete this one or delete the whole series.

This is a small feature, but it shows Smartisan pay a great deal of attention to users’ needs. I like this feature.

Why Apple and Google don’t do this? I think there might be two reasons: first, Apple and Google always have a lot to update for their operation system and apps. So a clock app might not have enough priority on product roadmap; second, their products are shipped around the world, if, for example, Apple and Google want to add “no alarm on holidays” feature, it means they have to get all data for the countries where they sell their products. It’s a challenging job. Smartisan only sells in China, so it’s relatively easy for them to do that.

Improvement

How we can make the clock app better? One feature that I want to do is to allow users to choose local music as their alarm rings. This would provide another layer of customization to target users who want deep customization of their phones.