Apps, as we know them, are over. This thing of having the home screen of your device littered with hundreds of little icons that you have to download, organize, search and prune is kinda insane, eh?
So, apps are over, but it's going to take a while. But the writing is on the wall. Or at least the writing is on the white board in Scott Jenson's office at frog design. Jenson is now Creative Director at frog, an influential, multi-disciplinary design consultancy to Fortune 500 companies. He had an impressive run at Apple in the late 80s, making significant contributions to System 7 (!), the Apple Human Interface guidelines and the Newton(!!). He was also director of product design for Symbian and manager of the mobile UX group at Google. I don't know about you, but I'm convinced he knows what he's talking about!!!
Jenson posted this notion initially as Mobile Apps Must Die, on FrogDesign's DesignMind blog six months ago. He has been presenting it at mobile development conferences, including last Friday's TL;DR conference in San Francisco, where Luke Wroblewski pointed it out. His post is a good read, but let me summarize the key points:
Value > Pain: With all design, the utility or pleasure has to be greater than the difficulty or complication of its use. Jenson says that, "these two primary aspects of any product, it’s value and it’s pain are usually treated as independent variables. Of course you want a high value product and just as importantly the pain of use must be low as well. What people don’t appreciate is that these two are intricately linked. What’s most important is their relationship: as long as value is greater than pain, you’ll be ok."
Performance Drives Use: Jenson refers to Google's experience of increasing usage of their products, by making minute increases in the performance of the Google home page, to show how usages is related to the pain of use (or lack thereof). It works the other way too, the less pain involved, the less value has to be offered to encourage use.
Native App Pain >> 0: The overhead of dealing with native apps that need to be found, downloaded, organized, searched for and ultimately trashed is increasing the pain of use for mobile devices as we acquire more apps and more devices. "Making the user responsible for app management is effectively inflicting a steadily increasing amount of pain upon them," writes Jenson. "This puts a increasing pressure on apps and they are going to be used less and less often. It’s not an absolute issue, but rather a negative example of Google’s home page usage. By making things slowly more complex and cumbersome, usage will start to fall bit by bit, hardly measurable at first but likely to increase over time."
It Gets Worse: Not only are we personally accruing more apps and devices, but as the cost of computing and connectivity continues to decline, we will be overrun by choices. In a prior post, The Coming Zombie Apocalypse, Jenson points out that, "Technology pros know about Moore's Law but often forget a critical aspect: it's not just about increasing power, it's also about decreasing cost." He goes on to predict (fairly safely) that there will be, "a huge new wave of cheap devices about to invade our lives—a zombie apocalypse of electronics, if you will."
New Thinking Required: The ubiquity of devices and applications create a wholly different landscape from desktop computing, just as the desktop diverged from the mainframe. The problem with mobile apps, Jenson makes clear, is that they are a holdover form the desktop paradigm. Designers and developers need to embrace this new paradigm, "not because we need to invent the future, but that our past is holding us back. We'll only really discover this future if we shed our default thinking of desktop computers." If the pain can be reduced to zero, Jenson contends, people will freely use any app they encounter that suits their passing needs.
Just in Time Interactions: What Jenson is envisioning is a world where our devices load applications opportunistically as we need them, in real time. The technological model for this, simply enough, is web pages. But these will be web pages with advanced functionality that can be accessed seamlessly from remote or local networks—and even from other mobile devices. He's thinking about things like bus stops that broadcast the arrival of the next bus, movie posters that beam you a trailer or retail stores that load their app on your device as you walk in the door. "The whole concept of just-in-time interaction is structurally impossible with installed apps," Jenson concludes.
The Power of Discovery: What's required to make this whole scheme work is some kind of discovery mechanism baked into our devices. "Quickly opening and interacting with smart devices isn’t possible unless you can find that device in front of you quickly. To effortlessly interact with the cluster of devices I’ll pass by throughout my day, I’ll need a service that is constantly searching, using the bluetooth, NFC, GPS, and Wifi capabilities of my phone to not only find, but also rank, the devices nearby.… This will likely need some help from cloud servers that will know a bit more about me to enable a reasonable ranking of these devices."
In other words, the percolating swamp of installed apps needs to be replaced by much more efficient channels of app discovery in order for us to make use of this explosion of data and devices. The real point is that there is a huge opportunity for one of the big technology companies to figure this out, and most likely many of them will come up with their own version. "I feel very strongly that this type of discovery service will be the next Google in a few years time," writes Jenson. "It’s something that Google, Apple, and Microsoft are all equipped to tackle right now. It could even be attempted by a clever startup. The idea of a system that finds and ranks the physical devices around me now is a nearly inevitable service." I find it really intriguing to think about how each of these companies would approach such a service and which would have a relative advantage. Strangely enough, Microsoft, who has reentered the mobile OS arena most recently may have a leg up, in the same way that some developing nations now have better wireless infrastructure than we do because they were able to bypass copper entirely.
In the present, companies have to decide how to move forward with their mobile products. Luke Wroblewski has a very sophisticated method for deciding between native apps, responsive web sites and what he calls RESS, for Responsive Web Design with Server Side Components, which is his proposal for a hybrid of the two. For everyone who has debated the merits of native apps vs. HTML5, Jenson's idea should be a clear signal that moving forward, HTML5 (and its descendants) will be the dominent channel. But as with all technological (and evolutionary) change, the new evolves side-by-side with the old.
The app is dead. Long live the app!
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