Nine actual uses of the smartphone
Mobile is not the name of a technology; rather, it’s the name of a tool to satisfy one’s needs. Let us distance ourselves from the discussion of which technology will prevail or what innovations Apple or Google have recently introduced. Today is not about whether an app has been coded in Xamarin, Flutter or ionic, what sensors or locations it uses to gather data. The users simply do not care. Instead, they care about what actual problems an app will solve and which of their needs it will satisfy.
Being in touch
Nowadays, the most rapidly-growing segment in terms of time spent in-app are communication apps — Messenger and Whatsapp. We may also hold conversations on Instagram or TikTok. Communicating via messengers is simply convenient, we do not need to focus our full attention on it, we may take part in an exchange among many people, add a film or an image illustrating our thoughts. And if we want complete intimacy, there is nothing that stops us from engaging in a videocall and talking to our closest with no extra charges. It is hard to find a more emotionally binding use of a smartphone.
Getting to know the gossip from another filter bubble
If we wait for a thing to happen for longer than seven seconds, we tend to check our phones. Most frequently, we look at social networking sites to check the goings-on in our filter bubbles — Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok all allow to fill our time, any amount of it. It is just that our brains organically hate to be bored. We may see how the most private and least controversial social platforms evolve. As people give up Twitter and Facebook, the popularity of Instagram and TikTok increase, where only important issues are raised and the world is created by one’s online friends.
Count of social site users in the USA, 2018
Trust towards strangers
What are the common denominators of BlaBlaCar, Tinder, Uber, and Airbnb? All work to allow us to trust complete strangers. When using Uber or BlaBlaCar, we enter a stranger’s vehicle, with the driver holding no licence. As recently as ten years ago we used to teach our children not to enter strangers’ cars! Today we encourage them to “take an Uber when coming back from the party”. Dating sites serve to preselect the candidates for a get-together. Thanks to Airbnb, we may sleep safely in an unauthorised place. Where does the power of such services stem from? Research of e.g. BlaBlaCar shows that when a profile is filled out with a lot of information, the user reviews and the description make us trust the given person as if they were our friend! Today we put so much trust in strangers that we do not hesitate to enter their cars or sleep at their homes.
Payments
Mobile payments… a user does not care whether they are mobile or not, they have to be convenient. Simply, a phone is a device that has become our means of authorisation and we tend to keep it by our side at all times. Thanks to authorisation, mobile payments are safe. Earlier we would need a piece of plastic and a PIN code in our memory. Today, the PIN code cane be stored in our phone or a smartwatch. Cash-free payments are quicker and more convenient, that’s all. The readers of this blog may treat them as obvious payments made with the use of a phone but they are still a minority. A few days ago, at a post office in central Warsaw I was, according to the employee, the first person to have paid with a smartwatch on that day. Subscription-based payments. Payments with means other than a plastic card, online shopping — all these are things that we want to keep at our fingertips and the phone makes it fantastically easy.
Recording and sharing moments
People love to record moments and are all that more eager to share them. One of the largest issues with digital cameras is that people love taking photos and making films, at the same time being reluctant to put them into storage. GoPro cameras come with a free Quik program to automatically edit videos. This all goes towards encouraging the users to share their works online. When we look at the way mobile phones are being marketed these days, most of them boast 2, 3, or even 4 cameras with good lenses. But what is more important, they allow for depth of field, previously unheard of in phones, and instead belonging to professional photography. Still, what creates phones’ largest advantage over digital cameras is the potential of instant editing and sharing of photos.
Listening to music and podcasts, watching film series
Despite technological advances, one thing remains unchanged: we love music. Mobile technologies are responsible for the increased popularity of podcasts and the number of music providers. This was noticed by e.g. YouTube Premium, eliminating one of the most annoying features — playing in the background. Now, it allows to listen to music and watch film clips with the screen turned off. Similarly, large screens and LTE connectivity allow to watch film series on a tram or a bus. For these reasons, the best equipment ever to come out of Apple factories following the death of Steve Jobs is Airpods. They connect and charge instantaneously, and also do not fall out of one’s earlobes during sports. Their commercial success finds its proof in the popularity of copied products.
Sports and physical activity
We want to take good care of ourselves, we want to look fit and feel great in our bodies. Problem is, most of us spend over eight hours a day in an unhealthy sitting position. It is hard to find the spark of motivation and remember about simply standing up from one’s desk. Assistance can be found in numerous apps, watches or bands that measure our activity levels. They do not contain any sophisticated technology, they simply give us feedback and motivate us to work out regularly. Do you remember tying a knot in your handkerchief in your childhood to remember to do something? Now your smartwatch is the handkerchief. Also, the devices record and archive our progress, so they act as personal trainers.
Identity confirmation
When discussing payments, we mentioned user authorisation. The phone has become our digital personal ID. Right now, using the m-Obywatel (m-Citizen) app we can identify ourselves at a Polish public administration office with our phone instead of a document. Let us expand this use to office access cards which always end up missing and which we tend to forget when leaving the office for lunch. The phone has become such a personal item that the “I forgot my phone” warning light always sets off when we get up from the desk. Other uses of phones to confirm our identities is in loyalty cards. Plastic does not serve any other purpose than assigning a number to ourselves, a number that identifies us. Surely, it is much more practical to add a loyalty card number to our phone than walking around with a deck of plastic cards! Thus, we are more certain to actually use a card in a shop and make a purchase at a lower price.
Fun, fun, fun
Mobile games are the second most popular method of spending seven seconds of our time, right after social media. There are two growing segments of video games — console video games that are rather expensive and simply need to be successful to cover major production costs (such as CD Projekt’s Cyberpunk 2077) and simple phone games. The gap between video console games and mobile games is narrowing down. We play either on our phones or consoles. Also, augmented reality and virtual reality are becoming excellent additions to games. Despite major technological advances in both these areas, decent video game equipment costs between two and twenty thousand zlotys. A phone, on the other hand, is something that we already have, often with screen resolution and processing power close to that of dedicated devices.
It’s all about motivation and need
As we can see, there is no mobile revolution. Technology simply does not matter. What matters are human needs and motivation. The fact that a smartphone is there to satisfy them is the result of the phones’ accessibility and growing capacity. Bringing a new smartphone app to the market is still not based on devising an original algorithm but rather on finding the needs of the users and responding to them
Author: Dr Krzysztof Wojewodzic, CEO of a software house https://escolasoft.com
