Mobile Forward

Your Phone’s Homescreen is Dead

Zachary Seward, for Quartz:

If nothing else, it’s fair to say the part of iOS that most people consider its nucleus is quickly being pushed aside.

Astute observation. Across smartphones, that’s been the point of Siri, “Okay Google”, Moto voice, lockscreen widgets, homescreen widgets, various OEMs’ “today” views, and other similar conveniences for quite some time. But, now, with Google Now on Tap and iOS 9 improvements to Siri (suggestions, always-on “Hey, Siri”) that trend is even stronger. Smartwatches, too, are promoting the idea, and capability, of using your smartphone’s homescreen less than ever.

Imitation Doesn’t Lead to Differentiation

Insightful article by Eva Dou, for the WSJ, titled Rivals Try to Reinvent Xiaomi Business Model. I think the use of the word “reinvent” is almost meant to be ironic; you won’t find any hint of reinvention from the executives that Dou interviewed. Some nuggets:

In a hint of how quickly Lenovo has worked to develop a Xiaomi rival, Mr. Chang said his team was still figuring out what the [Lenovo brand] name ZUK stands for.

and

One morning this summer, hundreds of young engineers at Wingtech in blue cubicles and humming research stations were busy designing and testing smartphones for clients. Large clients such as Xiaomi and Huawei were cloistered into private rooms, to avoid secrets leaking to rivals. But testing equipment was shared, cutting costs for all the brands.

After reading these passages, what do you think the odds are that any one company’s business model or product will be different than the others’? Low. One alternative path forward: caring about consumers and the technology it takes to build better product experiences. Don’t recall if the executives interviewed used any variation of either word? They didn’t. And that leads us to the prediction:

IHS iSuppli China Research head Kevin Wang said […] “A lot of these smartphone players are probably going to die.”

Basically, some Chinese OEMs hope imitation can lead to differentiation. It won’t.

Google Plans China Return This Fall, Reports The Information

Reuters, relaying the The Information’s scoop:

Google Inc expects to return to mainland China as early as this fall following a five-year absence, tech website The Information reported on Friday.

The company hopes to get Chinese government approval for a China version of its Play store mobile app, The Information reported, citing people familiar with the plan. (bit.ly/1NfthB8)

The tech giant is also planning to extend support of a version of Android for wearable devices in the country, The Information cited one of the people as saying.

China is hard to resist. It’s the biggest smartphone market in the world, in terms of units, and one of the largest, in terms of profit.

If Google does re-enter China, we’ll witness an interesting experiment: a well-funded mobile OS, with minimal app / app store share in this market, attempting to gain a foothold in the midst of thriving local app ecosystems.

If any device OEMs gain (a valid question), who would be most likely? Those without a well-established app ecosystem: Samsung, Huawei, Lenovo. If anyone suffers (again, a valid question), it’ll be a player with an established ecosystem, namely Xiaomi.

Premium Android Hits the Wall: the Q2 2015 Smartphone Scorecard

Charles Arthur, whose column appears in The Guardian, crafts an insightful quarterly smartphone scorecard. Below is the latest installment, published on his site, The Overspill. It’s an eye-opening read, and below I’ve pulled out my favorite sentences.

Premium Android and the piranhas

“Premium” Android is getting torn apart, piranha-style. Cheaper phones from Chinese companies such as Xiaomi, Huawei, OnePlus, and Oppo are taking away their high-end Chinese business. Slowdowns in developing countries (notably south America) are killing sales there.

And in the west, there isn’t the same appetite for continued upgrades that there was; people are upgraded out. […]

The peculiar thing is that Samsung is throwing everything it has at the premium end. You can now choose (depending on location) from the following:

  • Galaxy S6
  • Galaxy S6 Edge
  • Galaxy S6 Edge Plus
  • Galaxy Note 5

and that’s just this year’s models. […]

The iPhone, meanwhile, pulls people in and generally keeps them there too. […]

The point of no return?

I don’t think the crash in premium Android sales is a one-off. The competition from low- and mid-priced devices is fierce now, and yet these companies don’t seem to be putting any clear blue water between them; they’re not offering anything better than they did a year ago. […]

More than ever, the smartphone business is turning into one where only two companies make money from handsets – and increasingly, only one gets the top-end business. For the rest, they need something new to come along that they can get into and make some profit.

Spot on.

Monday Assorted Links

1. Benedict Evans on How Both Apple and Google Are Winning the Smartphone Wars (Video) Worth watching. Video is embedded below, too.

2. Rumored Xiaomi Mi Edge offers a curved edge on both sides of the screen Xiaomi isn’t shy about integrating newly-available technology into its products, so this rumor in the realm of the possible. And Samsung Display would certainly love for other OEMs to buy its flexible OLED product.

3. LG’s new smart sensor will turn your old appliances into connected gadgets Interesting idea. Simple functions.

Waiting for Android’s Inevitable Security Armageddon

Ron Amadeo, for Ars Technica:

Android was originally designed, above all else, to be widely adopted. Google was starting from scratch with zero percent market share, so it was happy to give up control and give everyone a seat at the table in exchange for adoption. […]

Android still uses a software update chain-of-command designed back when the Android ecosystem had zero devices to update, and it just doesn’t work. There are just too many cooks in the kitchen: Google releases Android to OEMs, OEMs can change things and release code to carriers, carriers can change things and release code to consumers. It’s been broken for years.

I couldn’t have said it better. The headline seems apt, too. I usually don’t write about security. 1) My experience is limited; 2) iOS isn’t perfect, either; and 3) it’s not quite a dynamic, cutting-edge topic. But the number and scale of issues on Android is getting ridiculous. Google made the trade-off between rapid scale and solid security. Scale won. And so “open” is now also a double-entendre.

Sunday Assorted Links

Still digging out from vacation. Lot of interesting developments.

1. Huawei, Xiaomi to hike adoption of in-house-developed smartphone APs. I think they’re focused on reducing their component costs, and on diversifying or securing supply, rather than on any sort of performance boost. An interesting excerpt, however:

Xiaomi and Huawei’s strategy is expected to directly impact AP providers such as MediaTek and Qualcomm. Within the global top-5 smartphone vendors, Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi and LG, which together contribute over 60% of worldwide shipments, four of them have already adopted in-house developed APs or have been aggressively increasing their adoption, which could seriously damage independent ARM-AP suppliers as well as x86-based solution supplier Intel.

Note, however, that Leadcore, the AP manufacturer working win Xiaomi claims that “Xiaomi wants its own custom-designed processors to differentiate its products and control its destiny“. I think that’s a bunch of marketing spin, and the “differentiation” is really a cost focus.

2. Microsoft Launches ‘Translator’ Free Apple Watch App. I haven’t tried it yet. In principle, sounds like a good idea; a good fit with the fact that a smartwatch is, in my view, essentially a tool. And it’s not surprising that Microsoft has a team(s) working to quickly deliver apps for Apple Watch.

3. Big Android Makers Will Now Push Monthly Security Updates. … because there’s something magical and comforting about the nice, round 30-day number?

4. Michael Lopp (Rands in Repose): “Busy is a bug, not a feature.” I suppose it depends on the role. I agree that for a leader to be continuously busy, or “too busy”, is not a good sign. Though it is more complicated than that (“war time” vs. “peace time”, etc.). Michael is now at Pinterest. Another interesting part:

“It’s gonna sound like I’m lazy but I swear I’m not lazy,” he says. “My job is to get myself out of a job. I’m aggressively pushing things I think I could be really good at and should actually maybe own to someone else who’s gonna get a ‘B’ at it. But they’re gonna get the opportunity to go do that [and continue to learn in the process]. My job is to — it sounds like I just want to sit here and drink coffee and talk about bread — but it’s about pushing it down, so these things, which naturally come to me [go to others in the company].”

5. Smartphones are hurting our children – but the real culprit is bad parenting. The headline says it all.

Google, Huawei Discuss China App Store

Sam Byford, for The Verge, incorporating information from the original source, The Information:

The relationship between Google and Huawei could be mutually beneficial beyond the phone’s co-development. The Information claims that talks are in progress for Huawei to help Google bring a mobile app store to China, where government regulations have restricted the search giant from conducting much business of note.

Will this be effective? Call me skeptical. (That’s not a knock on Google, by the way. I respect its choice to stay out of China.)

Search After the Search Box: Google Now

Mark Bergan, for Recode:

Chennapragada spelled out the three-pronged direction [for Google Now on Tap] — what she called the “bets” her team is taking. The first bet was embedding Now with Google’s full “Knowledge Graph” — the billions-thick Web of people, places and things and their many interconnections.

The second is context. Now groks both the user’s location and the myriad of signals from others in the same spot. If you enter a mall, Now will tailor cards to what people in that mall typically ask for. “Both your feet are at the mall. You shouldn’t have to spell it out,” Chennapragada said. “Why should I futz with the phone and wade through 15 screens?”

And this is where the third benchmark for Now comes in: Tying that context to the apps on your phone, or ones you have yet to download. In two years, Google has indexed some 50 billion links within apps. In April, it began listing install links to apps deemed relevant in search. Indexed apps will be included in Now on Tap when it arrives in the latest Android version this fall.

I’m looking forward to trying out Google Now on Tap.

Google Acquired Agawi, Whose Technology Enables “App Streaming”

Ingrid Lunden, for TechCrunch:

Native apps have overtaken the web as the main place where smartphone users go for entertainment, information and more. So it should come as no surprise that one of the companies that profits the most from our use of the web is looking for ways to get us to use the it more again. According to [Amir Efrati at] The Information, Google last year secretly acquired a startup called Agawi, which had developed technology to use and stream mobile apps over the web without downloading them first, used in applications like in-app adds to preview and promote gaming apps.

Cool. The ability to try an app without downloading it is great. There’s speculation, too, that Google might want to apply Agawi technology to make better web apps. Or, in hyperbolic terms, that Google is trying to “kill native apps”. The key question to answer will be: how will web apps deliver a better user experience than native apps? I’m biased toward native apps, for all the known and obvious reasons to-date, but open to the benefit of another approach, too.

SDKs are Signs of the Times

I couldn’t resist. These are all great companies, but they wield different degrees of influence, depending on the area. It’s also a reminder: The order of influence wasn’t always the same. Things change.

Google I/O – Selective Hearing & Amplification

After Apple’s “Proactive” initiative leaked this week, these words from Google’s I/O keynote — during the reveal of “Google Now on Tap” — caught my attention:

Selective Hearing & Amplification from Google I/O

  • Actions
  • Answers […] proactively
  • Context
  • Natural language understanding
  • Things (as in, things recognized)
  • Places (Google can recognize 100M places)
  • Knowledge graph (Google has 1B entities)
  • Neural nets (Google’s is 30 layers deep)
  • Machine learning

Machine learning […] is going to be a critical [capability] for Apple

Some observations

First, these are all related to, or enabled by, the bottom term: Machine Learning. It’s the ability for a computer to learn new things: shapes, patterns of behavior, relationships, and more. This is already a very important capability for Google, and is going to be a critical one for Apple, too. Why? Well, briefly, to enable Apple devices to make sense of the user’s context (location, activity, history, messages, related information, intent, etc.) and, in turn, to help the user achieve her objective, stated or implied. Things like catching a plane, buying a present, or meeting a friend. Or adjusting exercise frequency, sleep, or diet. The possibilities are many.

The figures [Google showed] speak to the […] massive, massive level of investment Google has made

Second, the figures Google mentioned — 30-layer-deep neural net, 100M places cataloged, 1B entities recognized — these are figures that not only speak to the utility that Google Now on Tap will have, they also imply the massive, massive level of investment Google has made. Investment in computing hardware (a good deal of it custom) and software (neural nets, understanding natural language, learning, user interface, etc.).

Finally, this is what Apple’s project Proactive — or anyone’s machine learning ambition — is up against. The question, for Apple is, does it compete head-to-head (symmetrically) or in a focused way (asymmetrically)? Probably the latter. Either way, I can’t wait to see.

Does Apple compete head-to-head […] or in focused way?

Market Scan Highlights: 2015-05-24

Mobile Forward 00240 2015-05-24

Highlights from this week’s Market Scan. Read it here. Subscribe here.

  • Why China is hard to figure out (Marginal Revolution)
  • Rumor: Android M Will Come With An Update Guarantee For Nexus Devices (Android Police)
  • Google seeking new partners for next generation Nexus phones (DigiTimes)
  • Apple acquires high-accuracy GPS technology firm Coherent Navigation (AppleInsider)
  • Apple: Tim Cook: Apple Pay coming to China ‘soon’ (Mashable)
  • Apple: Key iPhone 6s specs seemingly detailed in new report (BGR)
  • Apple: Report: iOS 9 will be optimized for older devices, including iPhone 4S (Ars Technica)
  • Xiaomi Picks Leadcore to Go Vertical – In search of its own custom processor (EE Times)
  • BlackBerry: Microsoft, Xiaomi, Lenovo and Huawei ‘evince’ interest in BlackBerry (IB Times)
  • Apple: KGI lowers Apple Watch forecast significantly, says over 80% of sales are larger 42mm version (9to5Mac)

Saturday Assorted Links

1. Apple Watch App From Starwood Will Literally Open Doors. Keyless check-in is cool. One of many ways that smartphones and smartwatches will connect us to things and places.

2. BlackBerry targeted for acquisition, say sources.

Microsoft and a number of China-based handset vendors, including Xiaomi Technology, Lenovo and Huawei, are being indicated as potential investors, the sources noted.

3. BlackBerry to Lay Off Undisclosed Number of Employees in Device Business. The company, like others, stopped innovating. And it also simply stopped adapting.

4. Researchers find Android factory reset faulty and reversible.

The group estimates that as many as 500 to 630 million Android devices might not be capable of completely wiping the data saved in their internal disks and SD cards.

The estimate is far from exact, and the real number could be meaningfully lower, but it’s still in the hundreds of millions. As John Gruber, of Daring Fireball would say, tongue in cheek: “Open always wins.”

Friday Morning Assorted Links

1. Google Tracker 2015 (I/O edition): Android M, Chromecast 2, and lots more. Interesting tracker of Google projects. Mentions the fingerprint API rumored for Android M.

2. Key iPhone 6s specs seemingly detailed in new report, citing a press release by supply chain analyst firm TrendForce:

  • Ships in 3Q (i.e., before September)
  • 4.7″ and 5.5″ models (i.e., no 4″ model)
  • Force touch
  • Slimmer, due to reduced LED display backlight
  • 2GB LPDDR3 RAM (faster)
  • Continue using dual-LED flash
  • 32GB as the base configuration

3. Apple Researching Combined 2D/3D Glassesless Displays. Of course they are. Probably for years.

4. China Shows Their Ambition In Semiconductors By Soaking Up World’s Technologies.

China is receiving appraisal that it had already surpassed Korea in technical skills and its ambition now is to compete against U.S. after surpassing Taiwan, which has many fabless competitors.

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