iPhone OS 4 — raising the bar again
Steve Jobs today announced the next generation of iPhone software. In the quality of execution — not just the length of its feature list — it keeps its lead in user experience. Apple would like you to believe that it’s the only game in town. It isn’t, but it does raise the bar again in many areas — increasingly not just in mobile. Advertising, in particular, gets a shot in the arm.
Steve Jobs did his customary keynote to launch the next generation of iPhone software — iPhone OS 4.0 — as a developer preview ahead of its end-user launch in the summer on the iPhone/iPod Touch and in the autumn on the iPad. There is a complete video on Apple’s Web site and, naturally, lots of coverage and analysis elsewhere on the Web (Engadget’s is geekily thorough).
It’s nice to see changes that address LBi’s key criteria for mobile usability:
- Discoverability — the ability for users to discover that something is possible (as distinct from the also important ability to figure out how to do something once you know that you can);
- Interruptibility — the ability to handle interruptions and changes of context with minimum disruption and overhead for the user; and
- Demonstrability— the ability for users to show (off to) others what they can do, in particular with little or no risk of failure and consequent embarrassment.
Discoverability has improved with new ways to make apps available. Allowing enterprises to send apps directly to iPhones they manage and allowing end users to gift apps to others removes barriers to awareness and trial, particularly for those less familiar or confident with buying and installing apps. The Game Center feature that provides some standardised underpinnings for social features in games (many of which are already provided in existing games by the developers themselves) also helps by introducing pop-up invitations.
Demonstrability and interruptibility are both improved by “multitasking”. The lack of multitasking has been high on the list of criticisms of the iPhone by fans of other platforms. In my view, it is also a major reason for the iPhone’s success — it’s so much easier to use that the (mostly slight) trade-off is worth it. The iPad (at launch) kept this simple idea and it certainly doesn’t detract from the seductive properties of the product in practice. As we predicted, therefore, Apple’s “multitasking” is an extension of its careful approach to the problem, the first step towards which was the introduction of push notifications. What iPhone OS 4.0 really offers for the majority of apps is very fast task switching — reducing the time and perceived effort of switching between apps by avoiding the need to go to the home screen first, and by encouraging developers to preserve complete state when not in focus. To this, they add some more specific services on top of push notifications — backgrounding for music (and a happy 13 million Pandora users); backgrounding for VoIP (happy Skype; less happy operators); location notifications. These changes allow multitasking while retaining good battery management and good foreground performance. They also keep extra load on the user to a minimum, so it looks to me like Steve’s claim that Apple has “nailed it” is pretty fair.
Interruptibility is also improved by the most important feature, iAds — Apple’s own in-app advertising mechanism. Mobile advertising isn’t new; nor is Steve’s claim that (on the iPhone, at least) that “search isn’t where it’s at… apps [are]”. What is new is the quality of the experience, which is arguably the best advertising experience on any device, mobile or not. Consider:
- If I touch an ad, I’m instantly immersed in it but my current state is visibly preserved. The whole app I was in slides quickly off the screen and the ad takes it over. Alarming? Not when you’ve experienced it a couple of times, because it’s consistent and robust and you’ll quickly gain confidence that it’s not going to disrupt what you’re doing.
- Dismissing an ad is trivial and instant. All I do is touch the top left corner and it’s gone — no hunting for a close box. Again, builds confidence to try ads. (1)
- Ads are rich — with full-screen video — and interactive. Built in HTML5, ads can include plenty of basic functionality — the demo included a simple game and a feature that exploited the accelerometer. And if ads have “taster” functionality built in…
- Ads can leave rich functionality on the device for later. This is a brilliant way to address interruptibility. I may spend a little time engaging with an ad, but sooner or later I’ll want to get back to what I was doing. By exploiting the new mechanism for delivering apps directly, ads can allow me painlessly and without interruption to leave an app on my device — all ready for me to use later on.
If you haven’t got a spare hour to watch the whole keynote, jump forward 44 minutes and watch for about 10.
A rising tide floats all boats — and drowns everyone who doesn’t have a boat
When the iPhone was launched, we said that it raised the bar for mobile user experience. This has been borne out by its success and by the way it has driven the mobile market as a whole (2). The new iPhone OS, and particularly iAds, push the bar up higher. This time though, the iPad has revealed Apple’s ambition to displace the 1970s interfaces of today’s Macs and PCs, so benchmarks are being set for experience on all digital channels.
In his keynote, Steve painted a picture of Apple dominance. He casually chose a “pretty good proxy” for market share in the form of mobile Web usage — where the iPhone dominates. This is a testament to the quality of the experience rather than evidence of penetration in most brands’ customer bases. For all the size of the opportunity in the Apple universe — which has grown bigger and more quickly than most expected — Apple is not the only game in town. Everyone is running to catch up. Handset makers, PC makers and operators all have multitouch and “apps” and some sort of “app store”. Microsoft and Google are pushing their own visions hard (look out for Microsoft’s announcement this Monday). (3)
How these experiences will be delivered to end users and who will be responsible is not clear. That they will come is a certainty, and today the iPad and iPhone OS 4.0 are the most tangible prototypes of what that future will be.
Notes:
(1) It wasn’t clear whether this feature is part of the iAd platform or whether the mocked-up ads shown in the demo are simply done this way by convention. If it’s the latter, it will serve Apple well to enforce the convention.
(2) People with every kind of phone are increasingly using the language of “apps”. Apps have effectively become the dominant concept for describing functionality on a mobile device, not least because the the computer-centric “site” has been so unimpressive for those that have tried it. We have seen expectations of the (largely not iPhone-owning) public for their mobile phones rise, particularly since Apple began its “there’s an app for that” TV campaign. For most people today, the way available to them to explore those possibilities is the mobile Web, which is why we see traffic to Web sites we monitor from all kinds of mobile devices is on the rise and why we say that 2010 is the year that many people will get their first impressions of brands on the mobile Web. Apps as experiences are here to stay, regardless of the technology used to deliver them — users don’t care.
(3) There is even an Android-powered television.
Tags: advertising, apple, ipad, iPhone, iphoneos, mobile, touch
