Cracking the code of apps
By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: April 16 2010 19:35 | Last updated: April 16 2010 19:35
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| Steve Jobs backed by a screen showing app icons at an industry launch. The Apple chief says such programs have superseded the use of search on mobile devices |
Not so long ago, it was easy to dismiss apps as a gimmick. In essence little pieces of code, which Apple allowed users to download to their iPhones from July 2008, the distinctive square icons appeared on touch screens like technological trinkets. Names such as iBeer and iFart made clear that some at least had few aspirations to significance.
Seldom, though, has a quirky cottage industry moved into the computing mainstream, or become such a cultural phenomenon, so fast.
“The app is the new 99-cent single – for kids, it’s the new currency,” says Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, maker of a US music app that has been downloaded on to 13m iPhones.
A bewildering range of apps has evolved, from news to games and other entertainment programs to more practical services such as airline flight trackers and birthday reminders. Apple boasts 185,000 in its App Store: other mobile software companies, including Nokia, Google and Microsoft, have raced to copy it.
This explosion of creativity is already causing reverberations. Apps are teaching users new ways of interacting with technology, creating different expectations of how software should work. And they are stretching the boundaries of online content, forcing media, commerce and other businesses that make a living on the web to rethink how they reach – and engage the interests of – their customers.
Apps – the name, an abbreviation of “software applications”, catches their casual, often highly disposable nature – have spread fast on the latest generation of smartphones, and are almost ready to make the leap to other devices.
As with so much else in the technology world, it is the virgin territory of the iPad tablet computer that has provoked the greatest excitement among app developers, even if consumers have yet to demonstrate they will buy the gadgets in large numbers. Launched with great fanfare in the US this month, its 9.7-inch touch screen offers a larger canvas for apps to expand further.
But tech and consumer electronics companies have been working on ways to repeat the formula on the many different screens people use daily, from the car to the living room. “You can see how some of these apps are heading to the TV and screens of other sizes next,” says Bart Decrem, whose company makes Tap Tap Revenge, one of the most popular games available as an app on the iPhone.
Silicon Valley financier John Doerr, one of the prominent investors behind the 1990s dotcom boom, says that with the launch of the iPad, “the third revolution in software” is at hand. The days when computer users spent their lives slogging over spreadsheets and surfing between static web pages are drawing to a close, he says: the future will be a series of apps, each purpose-designed for a particular task, and far more intuitive to use.
Predictions such as this are a familiar part of the tech industry’s attempts to write the history of the future before it happens to make a trend appear inevitable. Even so, the rise of the app looks significant.
Software applications that you download and run on a device are nothing new. Microsoft’s fortune was built on the creation of the first mass-market platform for applications: the personal computer operating system. But a number of things have come together to make the new generation of apps different from what users have been accustomed to.
Foremost is the experience of using them. Many combine features of both traditional software and an online service. There is no need to visit a website to find breaking news or check out the latest Ebay prices: information is fed directly from the web into the app.
“It feels new and fun – it has fused together the idea of the PC desktop and the internet behind it,” says Mark Pincus, who founded Zynga, maker of many of the most popular games that run on Facebook. “It feels a generation ahead of the old static web page, where there’s no software involved.”
For users, it is also easier to dip in and out of different tasks without having to deal with software or navigate the web. “There’s no desktop file system, there’s no saving and quitting when you’re finished,” says John Poisson, who recently sold his app company to online photo service Shutterfly. “You just launch an app to do something, then close it and do something else.”
The spread of new touch-screen devices has accentuated this feeling of ease. Apps are launched with a tap and manipulated by a stroke of the finger. “It’s a more intimate relationship between you and what’s on the screen,” says Mr Poisson. “You pick up objects and move them around – it changes the way people interact with things.”
Hardware advances such as this, in fact, account largely for the app explosion. This is the first time that hardware has advanced faster than the ability of software developers to use it, says Tim O’Brien, head of platform strategy at Microsoft. After the iPhone’s launch in 2007, independent developers agitated for permission to write software that took advantage of its capabilities – for example, the “accelerometer” that detects when the device is being moved, the built-in compass and the camera. Apple eventually allowed developers into its new technological playground – and the rest, says Mr O’Brien, is history.
Apps have thus evolved to be particularly well suited to small mobile devices, the fastest-growing PC platform. Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, even felt sufficiently emboldened to take a swipe at web leader Google this month: “On a mobile device, search is not where it’s at, not like on the desktop,” he said. Instead, people are “using apps to get to data on the internet, not generalised search”.
Another factor behind the success of apps has been the integration of smartphones with online catalogues where the programs can be found and downloaded – an idea that evolved from Apple’s iTunes music store. Add the fact that most apps cost either very little or nothing at all, and the conditions are ripe for enthusiastic take-up.
With developers scrambling for attention in a crowded market, most developers do not make any money. But the allure of reaching a big audience for very little effort has encouraged many to dabble. New forms of advanced multimedia advertising, such as the iAd system announced by Apple this month, offer increased prospects of profits.
The conditions that have led users of Apple’s App Store to download 4bn pieces of software on to their smartphones, iPod touches and iPads may not be replicated precisely as apps move to other devices. But the model has been enough of a hit for others to race to copy it.
For any organisation that operates on the web, meanwhile, this phenomenon points to new opportunities – and risks.
The first challenge is to adapt content to this new medium, which places a premium on creativity and a high level of engagement. After downloading and using them, says Mr Pincus, “you feel more ownership than visiting a web page. You’ve made a bigger commitment to them, and you expect them to be more interactive.”
With touch as the new user interface, that desire to interact is heightened. Old ways of consuming content online, like reading a page, watching a video or clicking on hyperlinks, can start to feel stale.
This was the original promise of the web – to transform content through interactivity. For many companies, the emergence of apps has already meant giving developers a far more central role in the creation of the product.
A second challenge will lie in working out how to reach and build relationships with customers, as they spend less time on a company’s website and more time in a range of apps running on different platforms.
In this world, says Mr Pincus, “it will be even even more important to be branded and differentiated”. Like a premium television station fighting for attention on a multi-channel system, apps will need to stand out on the crowded platforms of the future.
These different platforms – whether social networks, smartphones or tablet computers – will also demand apps that are designed to work with their particular strengths and limitations. Yet a company will have to deliver a common experience across all these platforms.
It is not clear yet how deeply apps will change the experience of computing. New approaches to interacting with technology tend to sit alongside those that already exist, says Mr O’Brien at Microsoft: people will still use keyboards and mice for inputting large amounts of information. Other user interfaces could take hold for particular types of activity. The movements and gestures that operate the Nintendo Wii games console might have a broad impact on gaming. Voice-controlled machines, one of technology’s great unfulfilled promises, could eventually change everything.
But in the history of human interaction with computers, pieces of software that are stirred to life with the tap of an index finger, or manipulated with a stroke, already seem guaranteed a prominent mention.
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