Dion Almaer

Software, Development, Products

Archives for August 2016

Minting Apps

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I have been obsessed by pulling apart groupings that exist today and think about how they could be more loosely coupled and what benefit that would bring.

One of these notions is the idea of an application being tied to an icon in the way that it is on some OSes. iOS is very strict and simple (1 to 1 other than bookmarks) and Android allows for more launch targets as well as beyond-the-bookmarks with PWAs.

When you think about deploying an app into an app store you are often tying together multiple concerns:

  • Distribution practice
  • Technology choices
  • User experience.

Do you have an umbrella app or multiple apps?

One app allows for:

  • One download of everything
  • Your brand is simplified in app store search results
  • Easy up-sell of new features into the app that is already installed
  • Clear notification channel
  • One place for ratings and reviews.

However multiple apps allow for:

  • Only download what you need (size matters, and even more so once you get outside of the bubble)
  • Features aren’t hidden, one app for one use case
  • Apps can be cleanly annotated in an app store
  • Clarity on what the ratings and reviews are for.

On the distribution side:

  • Many wrap web experiences via cordova + others just to get into the app store (as well as getting the escape hatch to native functionality)
  • Native apps have to deal with the promotion / install flow from the web side (with instant apps on android looking to help with that problem)

Searching for a Mint

When I saw the Google Search team post about the new inline games that show up based on certain results, and I add to that how I experienced the Olympics (seeing the results in search), I got to thinking.

What if Search, and many other experiences, minted home screen access. Why is “The App Store” the place to install? With PWAs we have brought that to the Web in an expanding number of browsers and it makes total sense for me beyond the “just make this one thing an app”.

Let’s take the search games. You do a search for [tic tac toe], you can play it right away, and then if you like it you can pack it away somewhere for later. This not only works for the internal experience itself, but for external ones. They can work in a similar fashion. For the internal ones though you get to play them very much inline, especially when you have a larger screen.

You can also see doing this for apps that have a master details experience. Let’s take an app that tracks particular counters, for example: number of push-ups you do daily, or the number of days until an event. Normally you have an area in the app that lists them all and then you narrow into a particular. Another approach could be to have the master view let the user spit out the push up counter “as an app”. The same experience then works from the home screen but also from any device that has the URL.

Speaking of URLs, these give us the simple ability to scope this all out. The main umbrella app is mycounters.com, and then mycounters.com/push-ups. Or maybe you go for pushups.mycounters.com. You can slice and dive it in any way that makes sense.

You can also do some of this in the app world by pushing between apps, and I am hopeful that this becomes easier too, giving us more capabilities to slice and dice there.

Users actually care about these things. Do you remember the uproar when Facebook took the messaging piece out of the app?

I am looking forward to seeing more experiments in how we can piece together great experiences, and how to allow for choices that aren’t as coupled together.

Have you seen any interesting approaches to tying together various experiences?

The Power of the Back Catalog

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I was reading a great book, Console Wars, that details the early gaming console fight for dominance. One period really hit me, and that was when Sega was trying to find room in a world of the dominant Nintendo. The Sega Genesis (or MegaDrive for those in the UK!) got a helping hand when Nintendo decided to ship a new version of their console without the ability to play existing titles. This gave Sega the ability to say “hey, you are buying something new, so try us out!”

That is an example of a mistake hurting adoption, but there are also plenty of examples of the opposite. There are times when a revolution is happening and you need to break with the past (going from vinyl to CDs) but it sure as hell helps if you go through a deprecation phase first.

I was thinking about Apple, and how the Web has helped them succeed with a platform in pretty major ways.

iMac

When Steve came back, decimated the product line, and then showed us the iMac he was able to get into the game by realizing and selling the fact that the things users wanted to do were mainly on the Internet. This gave us the “i” and the push to market those Macs as the best way to access the Internet. At that time the Internet meant many things, but the majority of what people wanted to do was use the Web. They wanted access to the amazing crowd sourcing of information, and ability to find it all via sites such as Google.

Once the Web up leveled from its birth as a document platform to that of a app platform Apple was set. You didn’t need Outlook when you had Yahoo! Mail. Microsoft, by fighting to win the browser war, ended up helping build an app platform that meant their native desktop application dominance no longer mattered too much.

iPhone

By the time the iPhone came along, we had been hearing that the mobile Internet was going to be huge for years. At every JavaOne keynote we heard that developers should be cranking on J2ME to build apps for users. That never came to be, and instead it was all eclipsed by the iPhone.

The iPhone was so much better, but many in the industry poo poo’d it. How could you type without a real keyboard (cried those at Blackberry). It’s user interface was leagues beyond the competition though. Steve showed off the importance of how it brought together functionality such as the cellphone, camera, and iPod all in one. He also showed off Mobile Safari, and I feel like this is often overlooked. We finally had the desktop Web available on a mobile device. Not a crappy WAP/WML experience, but the real Web! Sure, it wasn’t perfect. You had to pinch, zoom, and pan around….. but it played the back catalog. This was vital at a time when there weren’t any third party apps.

Then you fast forward to the era of using the Web to create apps and then native applications on the device. This was critical because you need to go beyond the back catalog. A user is buying the latest device to get great access to all of the affordances and power of the new device.

When creating a new platform, it behooves you to think of the role of the Web. As you create something new it can give you massive useful reach, even if it isn’t perfectly tuned to your platform yet.

When I look at something new, I now look for how they are leveraging the Web. Take VR for example. It is one thing to go after the hard core folk to create WebVR with all of its WebGL goodness. But I am also really excited about work such as CSS VR, because it allows traditional web developers to rather simply (via some CSS vs. learning WebGL/WebVR) join the platform. It’s “pinch to zoom” equivalent may be immersing you in a 360 image while overlaying the important content.

At this point the Web has content at an epic scale. It is content that is indexable, allowing developers to add functionality that crawlers and browsers can understand. It is powerful to enable the loose coupling between all of these agents, compared to setting up APIs for each side to interoperate on. I hope we explore more ways in which the Web can bring functionality to scale in an open manner.

*walks off to play some of the back catalog*

The right thing to do, is the right thing to do.