Mobile—The Remote Control for Your World
Asos, the online apparel business, sells more on mobile devices than on desktop websites, and gets almost 70 percent traffic on mobile websites. As much or more ecommerce gets transacted on mobile devices than on desktops today. Many billion-dollar companies such as Snap, Spotify, and Uber work primarily on mobile devices. By some estimates, more people own a mobile phone across the world, than toothbrushes.
The smartphone device evolution has plateaued. Since the passing of Steve Jobs, there hasn’t been a slew of new and significant improvements in the device itself. The immediate future looks rich for battery technology and folding screens. In the past 12 to 18 months, even if you bought the latest iPhone or a top-of-the-line android phone, you’re not likely to find dramatically new features in there—more like marginal improvements in screens, batteries, cameras, and sensors. This has made developing mobile apps and solutions easier as variety of phones in the wild has reduced. This is a good example of why the actual transformative impact of new technology tends to play out over a much longer period through mass adoption as the world starts to figure out how best to exploit the new technology.
The Smartphone: Four Important Perspectives
Whether your users are consumers, business-to-business (B2B) customers, or employees, it is likely that they have a smartphone, and that they depend on it for a lot of things.
Perhaps it’s an injustice to call the smartphone a phone. They are pocket-sized computers capable of doing many things, of which one is making phone calls. Today, my smartphone is my Internet browser, bank branch, e-mail client, note taker, airline check-in desk, the gateway to my social life, my music player, calendar, camera, task manager, watch, and newspaper. It’s also my TV remote, my parking assistant, tube map, wallet, game console, television program recorder, and fitness assistant.
Pocket Rocket
You may have heard the comparison that people often make—the iPhone has more computing power than Apollo 11, which took Neil Armstrong and others to the moon. To make this a more vivid comparison, the iPhone 6 has 130,000 more transistors, has a clock frequency that is 32,000 times faster, and can process about 80 million times the number of instructions per second, compared with the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) used in Apollo 11. No doubt the AGC was advantaged by not having to also deal with thousands of photographs, videos, and WhatsApp messages alongside performing its primary role!
Deeply Personal
We also know now that smartphones are intensely personal devices. Looking at somebody else’s phone is probably even more intrusive than looking through their purse or handbag. Most spouses and couples would not look through each other’s phones out of respect for privacy. From the moment that you start using a new phone, you start to customize it to your needs. Consider the smartphones of any two people—their preferences and indeed their personalities are distinctly mapped through their choice of applications, and the way they are arranged. If you’re on your third or fourth smartphone, you probably have a very set way of organizing your icons, which is the first thing you do with a new phone. People notice their phone is missing long before they notice if their wallet is missing. This identity extension and always-on device allows us to engage in real time with any product, service, or brand we choose, and conversely, it gives any trusted provider the chance to reach us in real time with our permission, in a 24 × 7 manner.
Remote Control for the World
The smartphone is effectively our remote control for the world. I can control my lights, my music, my television set top box, and my home heating. I can also interact with my daily bus, train or tube, taxi, and my professional and personal network. The idea of control is a very powerful one. Even though we’re not necessarily controlling the world, we are definitely empowering ourselves. I don’t control the speed of the bus, but thanks to my smartphone, I can compare alternative routes and make the best decision about whether to wait for the bus, or take the tube or follow some other route to my destination. I decide when I want to bank and how I want to interact with my providers, because I can do it anywhere and anytime. The smartphone has been the biggest contributor to the transfer of control and power to the customer, in the way service providers deal with them. While customer centricity was always a principle for businesses, the smartphone made it tangible.
Four Ways the Smartphone Usage Is Evolving
Augmented Reality
One of the most hyped aspects of mobile solutions was the promise of augmented reality (AR). As with most technologies, it went through what the analyst firm Gartner aptly call the hype curve. Initial overexpectation about what is possible is followed by crushing disappointment as the technology is too nascent to deliver all the things it’s supposed to. After which it often grows slowly at a steady and natural pace, through to adoption. AR seems to have been through this hype and disappointment more than once. The idea is that you look at an object through your phone camera, and it will recognize the object and overlay additional information on it. It could be a publicly accessible building—say a house for sale on a high street, which shows you the details of the house. It could also be a private and specific application. Educational apps use these, so you can point your phone at a picture of a dinosaur in a text book, and see the animal in 3D along with more details about its diet. Or it can be purely imaginary, such as the Pokémon game, which went viral in 2016. All of these are real examples. Starting in 2017, both Android and iOS devices have AR engines baked into the operating system (OS), so the load of building AR tools is even lower. I expect more AR applications to be commonplace soon.
Mobile Identity and Payments
Mobile devices are used for identity and authentication over the world. In the developing world, any online service you use, from car hire, to ordering food, or accessing your bank account, will involve a one-time password (OTP) sent to your mobile device. Banks and businesses now use app features to generate passcodes that need to be re-entered into the website. The principle in both cases is the same—the security model combines something only you know (your password) with something only you have (your mobile phone). Additional encryption, biometrics, and even location information are used for additional layers of security.
Mobile Passport and Wallet
You’ve probably had experiences of airplane boarding cards, or train tickets being saved as virtual passes in your mobile wallet. We aren’t yet at a stage where mobile devices can be virtual passports and identity cards. But the idea that your mobile phone should be an extension of your core identity system makes a lot of sense, given its additional geo-location and the kind of biometric information it already captures (face recognition, fingerprints, etc.). The problem isn’t technology, it’s working out the interaction between multiple ecosystems, and working out the data privacy, and ethical problems in sharing this data.
Presence
This is an interesting premise. In the pandemic, mobile devices were used by a number of countries for track and trace. Something that also brought Apple and Google developers together. Your mobile device is a marker of your presence or a locator for those to whom you provide permission. I frequently use this feature to track my daughter as she returns from school so I can be at the bus stop just a few minutes before she arrives. How else could we use the value of presence? Every time that a customer logs into your website, you know they’re there. You see everything they click on and do. What would it be like if we could do the same in the real world? A retail store doesn’t know who’s in the store till they come to the till. Whereas, a website can not only see who is on the site, they can customize the offers they make to the shoppers, and provide special treatment and experience to their best customers. But a retailer could, if customers were incentivized to declare their presence in the store. Then you could make special offers based on their shopping history, and even give the best customers a fast-track checkout, like a business-class experience.
Tip: Think of the ways to help people manage their identity, optimize their time, transact with their ecosystem, and interact with their environment.
Serving the Mobile User
The Mobile Website
There are almost 6.5 billion smartphones in the world today. About 80 percent people in the United States, the UK, France, and Germany have smartphones as we get into the 2020s. It’s far more likely that more people are accessing your website via mobile than via a desktop or laptop computer. To underscore the obvious, the mobile user’s requirements and priorities are often different from the desktop users’, so this is more than just a shrinking of the Web interface.
Mobile App or Mobile Website?
Mobile apps don’t really compete with mobile websites. Apps are typically for those people who are declaring an interest in deepening a relationship with your brand or product. Given a choice, people download apps so that they can access a service more easily, or because it gives them a better quality of experience. Either way, they make the investment of time, to download and use your app, presumably because they are regular users of the service. I would not download the mobile app for every airport I visited, but because I typically use the Heathrow airport many times a year, and sometimes more than once a month, I would absolutely use the app to make my travel easier. Imagine a scenario where your best customers or users self-select and make themselves visible and accessible to you. This is what a mobile app can do, for the business. Consequently, the requirements from a mobile app may be completely different from that of a mobile website. You need the app if you want to build a deeper relationship with your top 20 percent customers, or those customers looking for a deeper relationship with you. Most businesses need the desktop website, the mobile website, and the app. They actually serve three very different kinds of needs and markets.
Mobile First or Mobile Only?
You may have come across the term mobile first—this refers to the trend of businesses to build their mobile sites and apps before they build their desktop websites. This is a nod to the primacy of mobile. But I believe that it will go further, into a category of mobile only solutions. As highlighted in the opening paragraph before, Snapchat and Spotify (and WhatsApp and Uber!) are effectively mobile only businesses. And with year on year, the decline in the personal computer (PC) market, we are witnessing the switch from PCs to tablets and phones for households. This means there are some segments of your market with people who won’t have a desktop PC at all, and will expect to transact with you via a mobile device only, or a laptop or tablet at best. Are you ready for the mobile only customer? Is your business or product set up for an end-to-end life cycle of consumer engagement on a mobile device?
Developing Mobile Apps—What’s the Right Model Today?
Language
The right answer to “what language should you build your mobile apps in?” seems to change every year. Last year, the answer was React. This year, you see a lot of debates between Flutter and React. Fortunately, the implication of this decision has also become much simpler to manage. There was a time when the pace of change of the device demanded new versions of the app for android and iOS devices, and you had to go the extra mile to utilize all the benefits of the device. Now any app developed on React, for example, largely works well across most of the major devices. You may still need to worry about the unique capabilities of some devices and test for their unusual form factor—for example for the folding screen of a new Samsung phone. But over the past few years, entire categories of cross-platform mobile development tools have come and gone. If you tried building apps over the last 10 years, you may remember companies like Antenna, Appcelerator, Cyclo, Kinvey, Kony, and many others. All of which have been acquired and integrated into larger software companies. That in itself tells the story of the evolution of mobile development—it’s become a lot more standardized. It’s a reminder that the debates around mobile development were not as religious as they appeared, say five years ago.
Tip: Be prepared for this answer to change every 3 to 4 years or even faster.
Native Versus Web Apps
The other debate that has raged in the past was around native versus Web applications. Web applications allowed the same code to be run on the Web and mobile phones, or within a native shell. HTML5 has enabled rich features for Web apps. Today, all of these strands have converged, thanks to tools such as React Native, a development framework created by Facebook. These allow the use of versions of JavaScript for programming, but they in turn generate native iOS and Android apps. Apps are now much more lightweight and rely on getting data from the backend via APIs. Although there are purists who may have strong preferences for what development platform to use, this is probably not a debate you want to get into, in the 2020s.
Device Versus Network
A useful way to look at this is also to think about the triangle of device, network, and application. For the first few years of the smartphones, the devices were more powerful than the network could handle. It made sense therefore to put more of the processing on the device, and only use the network to send data back and forth. This led to heavier apps, and a preference for native applications as well. Over the past five years, with the availability of 4G and ubiquitous Wi-Fi, bandwidth has ceased to be a constraint. Today, apps can be much more lightweight, and instead get both the data and executables off the Web, for example to run within a browser. This is not different from the way desktop applications have been replicated by the in-browser experience for office applications like presentations, Word processing, and spreadsheets.
Tip: Your best customers will identify themselves by downloading your app. Treat them well.
Wireframing
A number of tools have been popular for wireframing over the years, but three stand out for me—Balsamiq, Invision, and Axure. Other options include InDesign, Adobe, and Sketch. Building a prototype or wireframe yourself is an excellent way to experience first-hand the flow you are going to put your users through, and you may find it helps to iron out a lot of the wrinkles in the smooth functioning of the app and the process.
Low-Code/No-Code
An entirely new category of tools has emerged for enterprise apps, which are particularly good for deploying simple apps within your business, that won’t justify the effort of a consumer grade application development. Let’s say you want to build a sales app for a new product to support your global sales team—so you have a hundred or so users, and a simple structure. Low-code/no-code (LCNC) tools allow you to build these apps using standard templates, and even connect to your enterprise applications. Microsoft Power Apps and Mendix are two names that seem to have gained traction in recent times.
Mobile apps are still under-exploited in the enterprise. Especially with the advent of LCNC tools as we’ve just discussed. Almost every employee facing process the Web and paper interfaces to corporate processes and services—expenses, travel statements, approval workflows, forms, and feedback—all of these should already be app-enabled for quicker and easier access and workflows. As executives and managers face the challenge of productivity and time paucity while dealing with hot-desking and more distributed work environments, they need to be able to quickly and efficiently perform basic tasks in a way that has been designed to make it seamless and easy. Expense statements are often black holes in large organizations. And yet, there are plenty of existing solutions from companies Expensify who can dramatically reduce this pain. You can scan a bill, and with available technology, it can recognize the category of expenses, date, location, and amounts. The system can do most of the work involved with classifying and submitting the expense and just present you with a approve/edit option. It can also encourage people to submitting expenses as they happen rather than after six months, which allows the business to be more current in terms of managing and monitoring expenses. In a world where creating such an app wouldn’t even require you to write a lot of code, it seems like a shame.
Enterprise mobility usually requires a device management or mobile application management solution through which your corporate e-mails and other access is enabled. This allows the business to separate personal from corporate information on the phone, and if required, wipe all the data from the corporate container without impacting personal information. It also allows the firm to manage the versions, access and usage of enterprise apps, and execute policies. These policies could even include geo-fencing or allowing a feature to be used only within a specific geographical location, or the opposite. For example, it could disable your camera within a certain radius of a high-security environment.
Tip: Enterprise mobile apps are an under-explored minefield of opportunity for productivity and value.
We are at this curious point in the story of mobile apps—where they hype has gone, but the real transformation is very much in play. The impact of mobiles in organizations will only grow over the next few years, and I definitely expect smartphones to be a primary interface for most consumers and office workers for increasing proportions of their personal and professional needs.