Software

“Why you got a new phone?”

Those words, spoken by my three-year-old immediately upon seeing it for the first time, are all anyone really needs to know about iOS 7. It’s a reimagining that catapults the system into a new era while retaining the most important intuitions built up over the last six years. So much has changed, yet the changes themselves are so basic. As Lessien wisely noted months ago, iOS didn’t need to change that much. The biggest risk was change for the sake of change: losing the efficiency that familiarity breeds.

Apple has kept all the right things, and built a new experience celebrating the values behind them. iOS 7 is truly the sum of its parts. On their own, many of these new elements — parallax, translucency, animations, motion — might seem out of place, even gimmicky. Together, they put forth a clear vision, one that’s reinforced by one of the best marketing videos I think Apple has ever made. Even considering Apple’s famously deliberate style, the choice and use of words in this video (and other WWDC materials) stand out: Clarity. Depth. Vitality. Detail. Deference. Realism.

It’s the realism I want to talk about. John Gruber calls it “A real thing, not pixels rendered on glass.” Rene Ritchie says “iOS 7 is alive.” This is the sort of update I was hoping iOS 5 would be nearly two years ago.

What took so long? I think it was a combination of hardware and momentum. Not so long ago, Steve Jobs was telling users that wallpapers were too slow. The deep animations and real-time blur effects you see between layers in iOS7 are all hardware-intensive operations. The tug of war between “realistic” design and hardware limitations led to an early compromise of false illusions — shadows, bevels, borders. Once these trends are in place, it’s hard to buck them.

Now the hardware has caught up, and the Apple design team has a new leader. We don’t need the deception of “photorealism” anymore. Despite the loss of these tricks, iOS 7 feels more real. The parallax effect conveys an entire living world under that glass, not just abstract pictures and icons. This is reinforced by the launch and quit animations: your eye never loses sight of where you’re going, or where you came from. You are moving through this world. There is almost no change in context, ever.

The emphasis on text is also striking. More than just content, text has replaced iconography in many cases. Look at Camera: the modes — VIDEO, PHOTO, SQUARE, PANO — are represented by text for the first time ever on iOS. This to me is proof that “clarity” has taken top priority. iOS is available in a number of countries and languages, which means every piece of text has to be localized (translated) many times over. This isn’t only time consuming, it’s disruptive to UI design: a short word in English is not necessarily short in German, and suddenly things don’t fit on screen anymore. I attended many meetings at Apple where people cringed at changing a word shortly before release, because it meant a whole new round of localize-then-build-then-test.

Icons avoid this problem — when done right. They speak no language, which is to say every language. Or they can only speak a few. The truth is, images have nearly as much cultural variance as text. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes a single word is worth a thousand pictures. That realization, raised above any logistical or procedural consequences, tells me just how serious this new philosophy is.

Clarity. Depth. Vitality. Detail. Deference. Realism. The revelations of iOS 7 are overdue, but still quite welcome.

Facebook Home is coming. It’s a unique threat to Google’s mastery of Android that Google can blame nobody but itself for. It’s the unique nature of the threat — both Home’s technical foundation, and the nature of Facebook’s rivalry with Google — that I believe makes Home the first real test of Google’s “open” mantra regarding Android.

There have been many challenges to date, but most of them involve “forks” of the Android system: where another company builds their own system on top of a previous Android release. Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Barnes and Noble’s nook, and Samsung’s rumored / assumed proprietary fork are all notable examples of Android derivatives. None of these to date have looked poised to take Android away from Mountain View anytime soon. Samsung, with its market share momentum and marketing prowess, could stand to be a significant threat, but for now its flagship products still run Google’s “stock” Android, more or less.

Horace Dediu put it plainly:

Facebook Home can only reside on Android because only Google was daft enough to allow it.

I’d add “for now.” Now we get to see how true to its ethos Google and Android stay. How long will Home remain on the Google Play store? How often, and how mysteriously, will it have “compatibility issues” with new releases? How long before launchers in general start to get buried under convenient categorization?

At the least, I expect an increased emphasis from Google on the virtues of “stock” Android, and an increased push to make that consistent for consumers. This is already underway on both OEM and developer fronts, but Facebook’s lurking presence will force the issue that much harder.

Home’s to-be-determined success could also force Apple’s hand. Such a product is neither technically nor legally feasible on iOS at the moment, and Facebook’s integration into iOS 6, while powerful, is much less than Facebook Home provides on Android, and thus presumably much less than Facebook wants on iOS. As I said last week, if too many consumers start considering Facebook Home a deal breaker, Apple may need to make some moves of its own. How many consumers that is, and whether they’ll in fact get on board, remains to be seen. All of this just underscores what’s at stake for everyone — Facebook most of all. With just one announcement, Facebook has made itself a strategic stakeholder in the mobile landscape. It’s no longer just a website and an app.

Google knew what it was doing when it made and marketed Android as an “open” system. It surely anticipated forks by handset makers as a manageable risk as long as Google kept advancing the system. But I wonder if it expected something like Facebook Home: an inside-out heist, made by a company after the same exact user data and advertisers Google is after. How it chooses to respond in the near future should give us an answer.

You’ve built an enormous business around a desktop website. Unfortunately, people around the world are spending more and more time on mobile devices. The vast majority of these devices run software from only two companies. One of these companies is actively competing with you.

You cannot put your future in a competitor’s hands. So what do you do? Do you enter uncharted territory, make your own mobile operating system, and hope people switch?

Of course not. You make your competitor’s system yours — overnight. Facebook Home is a trojan horse designed to steal the Android experience, and the Android user base, right out of Google’s hands. The majority of speculation over the last year or two had been that Facebook was working on its own mobile OS. It may well be, but this move is so much smarter on a number of fronts:

1. Time. Home significantly increases Facebook’s mobile presence without being everything. A lot of time and care seems to have gone into it, but it’s surely far less than a full-blown operating system would require.
2. Installed base. Built in. The sales pitch is very simple: If you have a device that Home supports, download it. No money, no switcher headaches. Blackberry and Windows Phone sales prove that people aren’t looking for new platforms right now.
3. Software Experience. Facebook’s engineers have surely learned a lot from this project. That experience will be reapplied not only to expanding Home itself, but to building a full-blown OS if they want.
4. Hardware Experience. While the software is the real news here, Facebook took the initiative to also start working with a handset maker. The HTC First is hardly a “Facebook phone”, but it’s a chance for Facebook to experience the complexity of coordinating hardware, software, and carrier partnerships from a distance. Remember the Motorola ROKR? Remember what happened fifteen months later?
   • HTC was the obvious choice. Samsung and Android have ruined them, and they’re desperate to stay relevant. Facebook likely got everything they asked for.

Facebook has loudly and confidently entered an arena it has no prior experience in, and has set a clear path to expand its influence at its own pace. Facebook Home will provide a halo effect to current Android users that warms them up to a full-blown “Facebook phone” in the years to come. It gives Facebook the experience, confidence, credibility, momentum, and time to build a better and broader mobile experience than they would have been able to build otherwise. It’s as prudent as it is ambitious.

I think we’ll know well before the end of this year how Facebook Home affects handset sales. If buyers start asking “does it have Facebook Home?” — and I think many will — that will be bad news for both Google and Apple. However, the Google – Facebook war is sure to be more vicious than the Google – Apple war because Google and Facebook have the same customers: advertisers. Users are their currency, and Facebook is about to rob the bank.

This morning, Adobe announced that it is discontinuing development of its Flash Player for mobile platforms: a concession from the owner that the technology does not fit into the future of computing.

People are calling this a victory for Apple, for “open standards”, for “users”,  but more than anything it is a victory for Adobe. A belated one, to be sure — perhaps too overdue to even call it a victory — but the company will unquestionably benefit from forgetting the past.

It’s easy to forget that Adobe did not create Flash: it bought it along with Macromedia more than six years ago. Among the other products that came with that acquisition, Fireworks and Dreamweaver have been fairly well-integrated into the Adobe suite. A notable characteristic of those products is that they are tools, just as Photoshop and Illustrator, Adobe’s traditional flagship products, are tools.

Flash is a tool as well, but it is also a platform: a runtime that obscures the browser and operating system in order to give Adobe more control. It is the platform part that has made this saga so unpleasant over the years. Adobe has never been a platform company, yet it felt a need to power forward with Flash. I’m sure that early on there was a serious vision of dominating content delivery over the web, but sometime after 2005 — just as HTML5 technologies were emerging, and ironically right around the time of the Macromedia acquisition — it became a burden. Between the money it paid and the money it had since spent, Adobe’s management seemed unable to just let go. MBAs often call this “escalation of commitment”. It’s now 2011, and only the delusional can pretend that things haven’t changed. After today, everyone at Adobe can exhale and right the ship.

Adobe’s announcement clearly states that only Flash Player for mobile is going away. The tools — the things that Adobe’s customers really turn to Adobe for — can now grow freely to please creatives in new, forward-looking ways.

I truly believe that a long-term Quixotic commitment to Flash Player would have destroyed Adobe from within. It was an expired product that distracted the company from its core competency of making tools for creative professionals. Adobe still has a lot of work to do if it wants to be a real leader in modern web technology, but this is the right first step.

This post had been a work in progress for quite some time. The unpublished draft was much longer, and had the working title ‘Adobe’s Dilemma’. It’s been repurposed and finally published in light of today’s announcement. I like this version a lot more.