Developers: Where the Hell is Your iPad App?
Ever since I got my iPad, my iPhone has increasingly been relegated to music player, backup browser and personal hotspot for its bigger brother. The experience of using the bigger screen, the clearer interface and the larger text are all just better, and the battery life is so good that I find I can use it as and when.
Most importantly, apps are almost universally improved. More room to add interface elements makes for a qualitatively different experience, whether we mean email, browsing, productivity, office apps, whatever. Magazines, iBooks, Skype, Facebook, Wikipanion, Dropbox, Flipboard, Kindle, Triple Town, Angry Birds Space and so on are all just better. Much better in some cases.
So, perhaps selfishly, one thing that drives me crazy is developers who have not yet made an iPad-specific app version of their app. Linkedin, Tweetdeck, Trello, TypePad, Sparrow and the niche strategy game Kingdom of Dragon Pass are among my personal bugbears. I’m sure you have many others.
There are four reasons why I think developers tend to do this:
Firstly, perhaps the developer feels that the iPad is a grown-up computer and so you can just use Safari and browse to their site, like you would on a PC or Mac. The flaw in this thinking is that many sites don’t work quite as well in a touch-based interface as they do on mouse (Trello is one example), and certain features just don’t work at all.
Moreover, using a service through a browser lens versus the slickness of a native app is a generally poorer experience. Location sharing, notifications, remembering login details and so on are often compromised. Google, for example, insists on using more of its web-friendly code in its products than other developers, with the upshot that both Gmail and Google Plus apps are the only ones that I know of which regularly forget my login details. Maybe it’s more secure, but it is also more annoying.
Just the pure visibility of the app is also an issue. Most users don’t realise that they can bookmark sites on their Home screen, and why should they? Part of the reason why apps are much preferred by the public to web apps is simply that apps are more visible and more immediate, like a desktop.
This leads me to the second point: Perhaps the developers are waiting for HMTL5 to solve all of their problems, so that when the time comes they can push a button et voila: Their tablet version will appear across all formats on command.
There is this promised land that developers constantly wish for in which a standard software platform will bring all hardware to heel. In this land you code once and publish to many and all is well. Only the problem is that all is only ever well under specific conditions, and in general not so much. Java? Slow and buggy. Flash? Slow and buggy. And HTML5 is so far slow and buggy.
In every instance that I’ve seen (The FT, Kindle Cloud Reader, Gmail and the most recent Facebook app) HTML5-based apps are considerably less swish than their native-coded counterparts. The GMail iOS app is essentially just Google’s web app wrapped a little bit of native code. It is slow and frustrating and not nearly as much fun as Sparrow or Apple’s own Mail. Likewise, the newest HTML5-ised version of the Facebook app may unify the experience, but it’s also slower and less stable than the previous, natively-coded version. There is no app that I have to process-kill more just to make it behave.
Natively coded solutions are better for the end user because they are faster, slicker, more stable, more feature-ful and in some cases even capable of particular feats that the cross-platform version simply cannot do. They are vertical, whereas their cross-platform cousins are horizontal, and verticality usually produces a superior experience. This is very much the case on iOS.
Thirdly there is the sentiment that the iPhone version will do. This is just plain wrong.
iPhone apps blown up to iPad size only serve to remind us how much better things could be. They won’t go into landscape mode. They won’t even render a proper keyboard. No, instead you have to look at what amounts to an iPhone seen under forensic lighting. Once you press that little 2x button and inflate the app in all its gory detail of blocky text and stretched graphics, it is as though a kitten dies.
Why, you think, couldn’t more be done to save it? Why couldn’t they have put the few weeks in to do a proper job? Why must my eyes look on this software tragedy? Because the developer has basically said “screw it, we can’t be bothered to fix this”. Even if you make an iPad version and charge another couple of bucks for the privilege (for which I would cheerfully pay in most cases), that’s better than sending out the marketing message of “it’ll do”.
Lastly, some developers worry about the cost, particularly if their iPhone app was not a success. Between the iPhone and the iPod Touch there are easily 300 million devices out there capable of showing small-scale app content, but perhaps only 60 million iPads. With 1/5th of the market, what’s the point of taking that risk?
The point is twofold:
First, it’s not going to be difficult to just scale up the app that you already have. You’ve likely done most of the hard work already in getting the guts of your app to work in iOS, so your iPad version is essentially just a re-skin. With many projects it really isn’t more than a couple of week’s work to get an iPad edition off the ground and into a rudimentary state, and maybe a couple of further weeks on top of that polishing it. Then submit.
How hard is that? And consider the extra few % of revenue that just doing this alone could earn you. I would urge you to be more ambitious than that, but still if we’re talking brass tacks, that few weeks of work could be worth much more than, say, trying to create an Android version.
Second, you’re missing the future. The iPhone became truly awesome when it turned into an app platform 3.5 years ago. At the time I knew many game developers (I work in games) who regarded it with suspicion, a case of wait and see, and so were entirely gazumped when Doodle Jump and Angry Birds were released. Only then did they suddenly all rush in at once and crowd each other out of the market.
This, you should understand, was predictable. The same developers were gazumped by Facebook too, and also by the Wii. Wait and see, they said. Let’s prove that the market is real first. Let’s not take risks. Too many developers consider themselves realists, even smart, for waiting. They are unable to make decisions until they see numbers that make their decision for them. So, they always react.
However history shows that more or less every major software success since DOS happens *before* those decision-making numbers emerge. Early-mover advantage is not just about being in the right place at the right time, it’s about having the courage to go balls to the wall in the assumption that it will work without proof. It’s an instinct thing, a judgement thing, an insight thing.
It’s about reading the runes and seeing the signs and then figuring out what the numbers will likely say two years from now. And then doing something about that. Fearful developers distrust instinct, and that’s why they lose out again and again. They’re just too afraid to make the leap. They want facts, and facts only come after someone else has won.
So, if you have the courage then listen: the iPhone is filled up. The iPad, on the other hand, is the coming platform. It has just had its Angry Birds moment with Draw Something, but there is still time for you to make that iPad version of your app that you should have developed already. Get it together before someone steals your audience from you with the product you should have made.
Happy Easter!
The Great Idea Slowdown?
We are more aware of our past, and cling to it in a world of accelerated change. We seek meaning everywhere, and disconnected tribes (niches/groups/interest/clubs) trade in signifiers (symbols/names/images/art) from older times as a way to connect. In some ways we seem to live in a world that is too self aware, where everything is a reference, and so ideas cannot avoid being analysed and discarded if they do not fit into sets of pre-defined memes. A world, also, which is increasingly aware of its limitations and sense of systems (politics/ecology/economy/biology/technology) spiralling out of control toward some ill-defined doom.
What to do?
Make stuff, invent, ignore the hubbub and contribute. It’s normal for culture to exist in some sort of reference-driven state. Even Shakespeare did it.
Majority, Plurality or Margin?
Something that drives me a little bit insane every time I hear it is the way that the British press misuses the word ‘majority’ in reference to election results.
In the rest of the world majority means “more than 50%”. If I ate 5 slices of pizza and you only ate 3, I ate the majority. However if I ate 3 slices, you ate 2 and three other people ate 1 each, did I have the majority? No.
Unless you’re talking about elections in Britain.
Under the current reporting standard, the BBC would report that I had in fact won by “a majority” of 1. What they mean is that I ate 1 more slice than the second placed contender, which in every other context of anything everywhere would be called a margin of victory, not a majority. My 3 slices are not a majority because 5 slices went to other hungry tummies. What they are is a plurality.
And yet everyone from The Guardian to the Mail would call them a majority. It seems to be one of those traditional language quirks, a holdover from elder times, but it gets my goat because I think it causes a confusion.
For example it conveys the impression that MPs are elected by most people in their constituency. This is not true. Even just counting those who actually showed up to vote (and turnout has rarely been so low), most MPs do not get more than 50% of the votes in their constituency.
Some get as low as 30%. Caroline Lucas of the Green Party was elected by 31.3% of Brighton Pavilion voters. This was reported as “a majority” of 2.4%, or 1252 votes. What that actually means is that she beat Nancy Platts of Labour by a margin of 1252.
She didn’t get a majority. She didn’t get within 18% of a majority. 68.7% of voters in that constituency voted for someone else. And there are many other similar examples.
Language matters. Perception matters. Honesty matters. At a time when the youth in particular feel shut out by the political process, the economy and society, Westminster has rarely seemed like more of an elite club. When even reporters are accidentally colluding in this by painting a false image of proceedings based on a historical language quirk, what are the uninformed to think?
Whether you believe in changing voting systems or sticking with things as they are, surely accurate reporting is always better than distortion?
On Redesign Woes #newnewtwitter
When you don’t like a design change it’s hard not to get tagged as resistant for resistance’s sake. You’ll be in good company on the one hand because a lot of people react negatively to any kind of change, as Facebook knows all too well, only to forget their rage a week later.
Sometimes this effect applies even to designs that were spectacularly in need of cleaning such as GMail. Before the recent spring cleaning in line with the new Google Plus aesthetic, GMail had become thoroughly cluttered. And yet still there are people who hate the new design, the fact that it uses icons over text labels and so on.
Because all sites are communities, they all attract cultures based on what they are at the time of their inception, and it’s not always the case that the site wants to attract outsiders into the community. Reddit is a good example of a community who’s deliberately lo-fi aesthetic is part and parcel of what its community thinks it should be because the techie feel of it keeps non-geeks away.
However there are also redesigns that make a site worse for no good reason. This is how the recent Twitter redesign (Called #NewNewTwitter) feels. Gone is the left-to-right reading arrangement which focused on the stream of tweets. Gone is the differently coloured sidebar that helped assist focus. Gone is the direct access to saved searches and lists (which is particularly annoying for me as I use Lists for news).
And instead we have the obliquely named ‘@Connect’ and ‘#Discover’ options which seem a bit too clever for their own good. We have nested conversations inside the stream which cause more clutter (it used to overlay the sidebar instead). We have all the least important content (profile, trends, who to follow) on the left, right in your reading range (which you can fix with a script).
In a snap the Twitter design has gone from the focused and powerful to something with more kid gloves. Why?
My guess is that Twitter wants to be a social network that everyone uses, but it has always had something of an aura of being quite technical. Many long-time users maintain that the service is hard to get into, but once you do it’s pure gold (which I agree with). However that is perhaps not the best place to be if you intend to sell advertising, and it means that the service likely has a high churn rate.
Maybe so, but if it is then changing the design wholesale should no longer be the answer. Twitter is over 5 years old, so a lot of its user relationships have already formed, its power user culture is very strong, and to start simplifying it risks pushing those people away. Sometimes there is no growth to be had in making things dumber than they used to be. Digg tried the same thing after all, and look what happened.
The previous Twitter design was not perfect but it was artful. It was an interface for people who knew what Twitter was already and wanted to figure out how to use it better. Clever, well-proportioned and sophisticated, it was interface that perhaps needed some polish in key areas rather than to be thrown out. In a side by side comparison, as someone who uses Twitter frequently, it was simply much better than the new new one.
I for one feel as though Twitter has just made a significant misstep. It needs to be careful not to Digg its own grave, to reject its existing users in the hope of finding a larger group that doesn’t care. It is reasonable to suggest that any service is done with its explosive growth phase after half a decade and that its challenge is to grow the depth of what it provides rather than its breadth.
Twitter, it seems, has failed to understand that and still thinks that it’s the new kid on the block.
100,000 Players for 60 Days [Traction]
‘I don’t really care about being right’, Steve Jobs said in an interview for Triumph of the Nerds, ‘I just care about success.’
There are infinite ways to kid yourself that a game is successful, but there are also many ways to misinterpret success as failure. Here’s what I think: If your game can attract 100,000 players who each play for 60 days then it’s a success. It might take time to realise its value, but you’re definitely onto something.
It has traction.
Continue reading “100,000 Players for 60 Days [Traction]” »
This vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary.
I had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which I’m a little skeptical of, given that I’ve actually tried them and the animators presumably haven’t. But that’s not my problem with the video.
My problem is the opposite, really — this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It’s a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is actually rather terrible….
