What makes native mobile apps special?

Theory: most native mobile apps don't take advantage of the things that make native mobile apps special?
— Adewale Oshineye (@ade_oshineye) December 22, 2014

That tweet was inspired by a conversation with Scott Jenson in which he asked: "what is mobile good at?" My response was: "anything that gets better if you can do it everywhere and add new sensors or transmitters."

I think I now have a better answer to a slightly different but more evocative question: what makes native mobile apps special?

Firstly these apps are special because they can use every sensor and transmitter on your mobile phone. That means they will also be the first to get access to new sensors and transmitters as they are added to these devices. This gives them more power than any other apps that have ever existed.

Secondly these apps are special because they're installed in a device that the user will carry around all day every day. That means that they will see more usage per user since there will be so many more opportunities to use them. It may even be time to start measuring average usage per user (AUPU) as a more quantitative version of Larry Page's 'toothbrush test.'

Finally these apps are special because they're on devices that will eventually end up in the hands of every post-pubescent person on the planet. That means they will eventually end up with more users than anything we've seen so far.

In short...ubiquity.

The screens in our future

Through historical accident, television has come to be seen as the first screen with our mobile devices as the second screen. This implies a mental model that's usually driven by television people who really mean that television is the primary screen whilst all others are merely secondary screens. When these devices are viewed from the perspective of the programme makers that is correct. But things change if we look at them from the perspective of the user.

The first screen is the one in your pocket. All others are secondary.
— Adewale Oshineye (@ade_oshineye) May 26, 2013

When we look at usage it becomes clear that mobile devices (currently just phones and tablets) are the primary screen whilst television and desktop computers are the secondary screens.

Mobile is my screen.
Tablet is our screen.
TV is their screen.

-- Simon Davies and Ade Oshineye

The above quote is a synthesis of points made by Simon Davies and Ade Oshineye during an Internet Week panel discussion. They reflect a way of looking at screens/devices that may have surprising amounts of explanatory power.

The mobile (phone) screen is the most personal screen. It tends to belong to one person who carries it everywhere and seldom shares it. That person will customise it with a combination of apps and bookmarks that's practically a fingerprint. 

The tablet is large enough to be viewed by multiple people and is often shared within a family. As such it accumulates layers of choices from all the people who have used it. However it still tends to feel like a device that belongs to a small set of people. Whilst both of these devices empower people by giving them control over usage and content, the television is different. 

Whilst it may belong to one or many you're never allowed to forget that the content on your television is decided by other people. They decide what you can watch and when you can watch it. As for customisation…forget it.

The final step is to realise that we shouldn't be thinking about a fixed number of screens. We're facing a multi-screen future. That means there are going to be N categories of M screens in your life. And the values of N and M will only increase over time.

This is not a problem we will solve by building responsive websites with a fixed number of breakpoints. This is not a even problem we will solve by pouring the same content into a fixed number of buckets or screen sizes.

This is a Cambrian Explosion of contexts, interactions between contexts and user journeys across contexts. Time to adapt.

Implications of being post-PC

At last night's OSJam I gave a lightning talk about the implications of being post-PC.

Those implications were:
Identity: a post-PC device needs to know its owner's identity since it can't rely on obtaining that information from a PC. At the moment all the devices are building their own identity platforms but eventually they'll start to take advantage of existing identity systems like Webfinger and PGP.

Personalisation: a post-PC device can be uniquely personalised because it's not predicated on the idea that it will be a shared device. The classic example is the experience when you buy a Kindle from Amazon. It will be preconfigured with your name and the books you've already bought. It's a small step from there to a future where the moment I bought a device in a shop it would automatically know that it belonged to me.



Cloud: post-PC devices tend to be heavily dependent on the cloud in order to store persistent state and to perform sophisticated processing. The definition of the cloud that this implies comes from Simon Meacham. He says that the cloud means treating the union of all those servers/networks/services as if they were one machine available to be used by everybody. In this vision the physical devices we own are merely portals to and caches for this metaphorical "one machine."

Mobility: if our data and services live in this cloud then all the devices I can log in to are equivalent. At this point the ability to take a device to the place I wish to use it (for instance the Kindle screen is supremely legible in bright sunlight unlike the screens of most mobile phones) and the fact a given device is ready-to-hand will trump all other considerations. Photographers have long had a saying "the best camera is the one you have with you" and the rest of the world will soon experience something similar.

Devices: new kinds of devices become possible, if not inevitable, in a post-PC future. Technology will migrate to the most convenient form and place in your life. That means computers, cameras and music players will start becoming features of watches, jewelry and clothing. That's partly because people actually like their watches, jewelry and clothing whilst they mostly tolerate their computers. The early examples of this are Nike+ and the increasing variety of smart watches. In fact several of the people attending OSJam were wearing the precursors of the smart watches of the future. Furthermore once people stop expecting technology to be delivered to them in a beige box it opens the doors to new innovators such as Arduino enthusiasts and the open source hardware community.

From OSJam 19 - Post-PC: gadgets of the now

Personal Area Networks: The logical culmination of this is the personal cloud or personal area network. This is not merely a network of devices that are physically close to one person. Instead it is a network of devices that are geographically distributed but which can connect to each other (via a variety of networks and protocols including the internet, wifi and bluetooth) and prove that they belong to the same person. The devices are tied together by the fact that they belong to a single person and therefore they can seamlessly share each other's functionality.

These are merely my guesses about what's likely to happen as a consequence of these post-PC devices. Ultimately Alan Kay is right: the only way to predict the future is to invent it.