Twitter, canvases and cards

Twitter used to be a protocol - rather like SMTP or IMAP. Other people made Twitter clients, with many different interfaces, and Twitter poked around with metadata (adding retweets, for example), but the user experience was something other people built.

Then Twitter pivoted, and deprecated the third party apps, and took control of the interface. The obvious thing that it did with that was to deliver a predictable offer for advertisers. But the more interesting thing to me was that it created a canvas - which is now turning Twitter from a protocol to a platform. 

Twitter is turning 'Twitter cards' into a platform. You can embed video, or slides, or music - all sorts of things. You can embed a call to action that will harvest the account's email address. And, increasingly, you can drive acquisition - of Spotify users, or apps, or customers. And thanks to retweets these cards can end up anywhere on Twitter, far beyond the original poster's network. 

Twitter isn't the only company doing this sort of thing. Many of the new crop of social messaging apps, such as Line, Kakao, WeChat and Kik, are also creating canvases of various kinds within their services - within individual messages. Kik and WeChat are exploring HTML5 games within the app itself, and WeChat is playing with retail coupons. Some of the results are pretty strained, but there's obvious value in being able to send tracks, game levels or yelp reviews through such apps, and sending them as rich, actionable cards is much better than a URL string.

(Interestingly, though, probably the biggest social messaging app outside China, Whatsapp, is pretty much the only such app that isn't  trying to become a platform in this way, at least not yet.)

Cards are an interaction model that are spreading pretty widely, in fact. They're an important part of how Google presents the newish 'entity' based search, which crop up in the right sidebar on the web and of course as part of Google Now. Part of the magic is the semantic understanding of data that lets Google make these automatically, but the presentation is, again, a card. 

And then there's Airdrop, an intriguing feature in the new iOS7 that's been rather buried by all the fuss about the new visual design. Instant, zero-configuration local sharing (remember Bluetooth?). Apple's screenshots focus on photos, but to developers this is just part of the standard sharing API, and you can put anything in here - coupons, game levels, deep links to reviews or songs. But instead of sending it by SMS or email, you can pass it across a bar top. No canvas, this time (except for pictures themselves), but again the atomised content. 

What all of these have in common is that they're pulling information out of the app or the service and making it relevant to the moment. They're taking things out of silos, packetising them and making them sharable. But at the same time, they're making them canvases - not just files, but cards, content, real things that you can pass around. 

In some senses, this started with Facebook, which had a canvas a long time ago (in internet time, at least). Facebook is present on mobile and doing well, claiming close to 800m mobile users, though it isn't close to winning in the sense that it won on the desktop, not with hundreds of millions of Facebook users choosing also to use WhatsApp et al.

But Facebook is about aggregation - about sucking everything into the gravitational well and spitting it back out through a black box filter to stop you being swamped. Facebook is a an endless stream whereas cards are individual. The point of 'cards', like the story of mobile social, is disaggregation - of the over 200m people who already had Facebook but are using WhatsApp for messages- the 100m Instagram users who prefer it to Facebook for photos, and so on, and so on.  

From a business point of view, this is interesting because it points to distribution and discovery. How do new products and services get passed around? How does social sharing evolve? Complexity increased, too - how do you do SEO for Google Now? How should you think about conversion rates on a Kik card or a game shared over Airdrop?T here's a sort of inexorability to this: Zawinski's Law states that "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail." One might now say that every product and service online expands until it can distribute freemium games. 

I think there's also a question of being native to the platform, though. Chris Dixon wrote recently about finding things that are native to mobile as opposed to mobile versions of desktop products. What could be more native to a smartphone than a piece of content the size and shape of a smartphone screen, that can be sent anywhere?

iOS

So, Jonny Ive certainly changed things in iOS, just 7 months after taking over. The new version will be out in the autumn with a whole new look and a systematic rethinking of how things work together, though not any fundamental change in how your mother uses it. 

He didn't make things 'flat' - in fact the new UX model is based on depth and layers. There's a shock of the new (analogous to the shock of the original Mac OSX, which was also radically different), and plenty of graphic designers are complaining about the colour palette and the typography (forgetting that this is a beta, and that they're mainly only seeing static screenshots). A lot of apps will have to be rethought if they're not to look painfully out of place, just a year after the switch to the larger screen prompted another redesign, illustrating the ways apps are an ongoing commitment if you don't want to damage your brand. 

From personal experience, the new look is startling in screenshots but makes a lot of sense when you use it. And actually, most things are roughly the same, just clearer and simpler. But beyond the 'chrome', it seems to me that there are three important things to note. 

First, how it works is what matters, and Apple has made a lot of things work better. Most of the UX inconsistencies and confusions (accreted over the past 6 years) have been fixed and, as in every new version of an OS, there are lots of nice little improvements and cool new things. 'Airdrop' peer-to-peer local file sharing (pass this photo/address/video to your friends in the same room, with no set-up at all) solves a real user problem in a way that NFC has tried and fail to address for years, for example. 

Second, there are no fundamental structural changes. There is no new model to let apps talk to each other, no API for Siri, no synthesis of the app store and web apps, no (increased) social integration. This may or may not be a good thing. Apple is effectively doubling down on third party developers rather than trying to do more and more itself (Android and Google Now) or integrate everything social into the OS (Windows Phone). Maybe this is philosophical but maybe there just wasn't time, given how much other new stuff there is.

But on the other hand, Airdrop points to some intriguing new opportunities. Things you could 'Airdrop' to your friend's phone as you sit in a bar with them: a video, a Spotify track, a game level, a game, a Yelp review, access to a Dropbox folder...

Third, lots of interesting new APIs for developers. For example:

  • Multitasking has been enhanced, allowing more apps to do background downloads without (hopefully) sacrificing battery life.
  • Apple is pushing to maintain its lead in games with a new 'Sprite kit' API to make it much easier to make some of the most popular types of games, and adding support for external controllers (which may also point to the future of the Apple TV)
  • Built-in barcode recognition
  • Bluetooth Beacons APIs, so that a retailer can make an app that will know exactly where it is in a store
  • Many improvements to help corporate and educational deployment
  • And judging by the applause in the developer session for iCloud, a lot of pain points there have been addressed. But no mention of a step change in the quality of data in Apple Maps. 
Overall, I think this maintains Apple's position at the premium end of the market and as the first choice for most developers, but it probably doesn't change anything in the direction of the market, and most developers now have to address Android too (which may limit how many of these APIs they can really take advantage of if they need a cross-platform product).

It (obviously) does not broaden the market for iPhones as long as the phones themselves are priced at the premium end of the market - hence the ongoing speculation about a cheaper phone. My bet is $200, to hit the top end of prepay. We'll see in the autumn when the new hardware is unveiled. 

A final note - Google didn't actually announce a new version of Android at Google IO - though it did create a lot of features in Play that will be available to most Android devices. So there's another big unveil coming. 

Counting geeks: who cares that Android is 'open'?

An exercise in idle curiosity, this, spurred by a conversation last week with a VC in New York.

It's clear that there's a highly vocal and highly technical group of people who love all of the technical things you can do with Android phones that you can't do on iOS, consciously reject the iPhone and care deeply about 'openness' and all the things that go with it. However, it's also clear that these people are a minority of actual Android users, given that the typical use levels seen from Android in totality are lower than those from the iPhone (often much lower).  

What hasn't been clear, though, is quite how small that community is. 

One interesting proxy for geeks who care deeply about 'open', of course, is desktop Linux. There is (obviously) no central source for Linux users, but we can still get a pretty good idea. Ubuntu, which is probably the single most popular flavour, claims 20m daily users. Meanwhile Wiki provides a useful set of stats for devices hitting their servers: it claims that 1.42% of requests in March 2013 came from Linux (excluding Android Linux), of which 0.5% was ubuntu - 35% share. Scaling this up (and treating people who only use desktop Linux occasionally rather than daily as being outside the definition) would imply about 57m users. This is quite close to the Linuxcounter estimate of 66m. 

(The global PC base (desktops and laptops, not servers) at the end of March was somewhere in the 1.6-1.7bn range, implying a notional 3.6% share, but that's not really a good comparison, since many of those PCs, both linux and other, will not be online. )

So, the Linux proxy says 60m or so, but can we get a more specific sense of geeks using Android? Another proxy is use of ROMs - custom versions of Android you install yourself. Probably the most popular (outside China) is Cyanogenmod. This reports about 5.4m users, but an unknown number have turned off statistics reporting. Other leading ROMs include AOKP, which passed 1m installs in April, and MIUI, which hit 1m in February. That means there are at least 7m people who've done this (assuming no overlap), and probably rather more - say 10-15m as a possible ceiling?

Of course, this is for the really hard core. Another, broader, proxy comes from the Root and ROM tools - apps for Android that let you mess about with arcane system settings. A scan through the download counts of the top such apps on Google Play points to, (as one would expect) a higher number. Superuser, for example, has had 10-50m downloads, as have several similar tools, while Root Task Killer claims 20m users but Play only reports 5-10m users, pointing to the prevalence of side-loading, especially in this demographic. There's clearly a lot of overlap here as well: few people will have downloaded only one. However, this data makes it hard to support an 'Android geek count' of much over, say 50-60m. If you assume a lot of sideloading (even of free apps) you might push it up to 100m, but that would be pretty tenuous. 

These tools are still pretty hard-core, though. How about a more mainstream benefit of openness - such as the ability to choose your own keyboard? Well, Swiftkey has had 5-10m downloads. (It's also preloaded on some phones, but that's a different issue - we're looking at people who do this to their phones themselves). Swype, on the other hand, claims 250m users, and over 100m direct downloads, but those users are mainly due to a successful OEM preload strategy. 

Meanwhile, I can say with a pretty high degree of confidence that there are around 800m Android devices in use outside China.  

So, subject to all the obvious caveats, this enables two hypotheses: 

  • Less than a tenth of Android users care that it's open
  • The number of people who care that Android is open is about the same as the number of people who run Linux

These are just  hypotheses, of course - if anyone can suggest data that points another way I'd love to hear it. 

Mobile water companies

To me, a mobile operator that still wants to provide data services (as opposed to connectivity) is rather like a municipal water company that decides it wants to be in the bottled mineral water business.

They see Evian and Fiji and they say to themselves "Hey! These guys are making a fortune in a business we ought to own. We know water. We HAVE water. We have trucks, and distribution, and customer relationships. Even more, we have a brand that consumers trust. Why would you trust water from a company you've never heard of- we have a huge advantage!"

So they hire McKinsey to do the plan, and Wolff Olins to come up with a brand. And two or three years later they launch the new, trusted, approved bottled mineral water. And the first bottles arrive in the supermarket and are put on the shelves next to the other 40 brands. And pretty soon the guiding execs leave (bio: "successfully delivered global launch of...") and the whole project is quietly forgotten.

Now, there are of course all sorts of problems with this analogy, but the key point is that something can look like it's an adjacent area when actually all of your skills and leverage points are irrelevant. Mobile operators have almost none of the skills and leverage points needed to be relevant for anything other than connectivity.

Indeed, one by one all of the factors that mobile operators thought were their unique advantages have gone away. Location went to GPS, payments to iTunes and Google (though operator billing still has a place, especially in emerging markets), identity to social networks (though the PSTN number often still plays a role in that), and the whole locus of innovation (and of lock-ins) has moved up the stack to smartphone platforms and the apps that run on then. Attempts at innovation by mobile operators, such as WAC, JOYN or the laughable Firefox Mobile partnership, are not so much flawed as irrelevant: it is simply not their role to play in this space.

Facebook and alternatives on mobile

At the moment I spend most of my time working for Enders Analysis, a boutique TMT research and consulting shop. Every year Enders does a big UK mobile user survey, and this year I stuck in some questions about use of Facebook and of mobile messaging apps (Whatsapp et al). On Friday I put out a note to Enders clients with the conclusions, but this chart is worth publishing as a teaser. 

The universe is UK adult mobile users. Of these, about 66% now have a smartphone, and 39% are using Facebook on mobile. But, a majority of those users are also using one or other of the various mobile messaging apps - Whatsapp, Kik, Viber and so on - and overall a quarter of the UK adult mobile base is using them.  

If you look just at 16-24s, the data gets even more interesting: 70% report they're using Facebook and 57% are using other messaging apps. Again, there's massive overlap: people have Facebook but chose to use other things instead. 

On market share

For the last couple of years, the standard way to look at the progress of the 'platform war' between Apple, Google and the now near-vanquished Nokia and RIM was 'smartphone market share': each platform's share of the share of the phone units sold each quarter that could be defined as 'smart'. The chart looks something like this. 

There's a fairly simple narrative here: Apple more or less flat for years at or around 20%, Nokia and RIM collapsing, Android (both activated and 'unactivated' - i.e. China) taking all the rest. You can also show it like this: 

Same data set, different chart.

However, there's a rather important problem with looking at the data like this: there is no such thing as a 'smartphone market'. Or rather, talking about the 'smartphone market' is like talking about the '3G' market or the 'colour screen phone' market: you're picking out a sub-segment that is going to grow to take over the whole market. And ignoring the growth. 

All of a sudden, you can see the growth.

This difference is particularly clear if you focus just on Apple. To take an analogy from another industry, Tesla's share of the 'electric car' market is probably going to fall over time, as more companies start making electric cars - but that's not the point, because its share of the 'car' market is probably going to grow. 

The whole mobile phone market is converting to smart. Apple is taking the high end and Android is taking the rest. Both are growing very fast, and Android is growing faster. But what matters is phone share, not smartphone share. Just to make the point absolutely obvious, this is another way again to look at the market. 

The fact that Apple is taking the high end means that it has a disproportionate share of revenue and hence profit. Meanwhile, the fact that Samsung has squeezed most of the other branded OEMs down to a size at which it's very hard for them to make a profit means that Samsung and Apple between them make almost all the profit in the mobile handset industry. 

(This slide is taken from my presentation 'Mobile is eating the world')

At this point Apple advocates can risk getting a little carried away. 'Aha!', they say, 'Apple may only sell 10% of phones but it gets well over the half the profit, so it's winning the platform wars, or at least not losing.' 

Well, up to a point. The objective of any hardware maker is indeed to make a profit, and Apple's doing pretty well there. But it can't really take credit for the poor economic health of so many other OEMs - if anything that's down to Samsung. If there was some consolidation then those companies would be more profitable and Apple and Samsung's profit share would fall - that wouldn't mean their performance was deteriorating.

More importantly, the point of a platform war is the health of the platform itself, not necessarily the OEMs. Apple's Mac was soundly beaten by Microsoft, not by Gateway 2000 or any of the hundreds of forgotten failed PC clone makers.

That is, it doesn't matter to Google or to Android that Android OEMs are mostly much less profitable than Apple, so long as good Android phones keep getting brought to market (and they do). And the unprofitability of most Android OEMs tells us little or nothing about how much it matters to Apple that there are now a lot more Androids than iPhones out there. 

And then again, all the data we have about the systemically lower engagement of Android users means that 'platform market share' is also an unhelpful metric. 

To put this another way, looking at 'smartphone share' or 'profit share' or 'platform share' all tell you something about the industry, but all three metrics mislead you if you try to treat them as a way to see who's 'winning', because 'winning' means different things for Apple, Samsung or Google. After all, Google may well still make more money from searches on iOS than it does from searches on Android. There's no easy way to fit that into any of these charts. 

Google IO

My main impression of Google IO was not so much any specific announcement as the overwhelming sense of ambition and self-confidence. This was very reminiscent of Microsoft 20 years ago, at the height of its pomp (and of course just before it all started to go wrong). Just as Microsoft cross-leveraged Windows and Office, and then Internet Explorer, Google is cross-leveraging search, Gmail, Maps, Android and everything else, tying them together with Plus.

The objective is to index not just the web but the users - to drive better understanding of the data by knowing how and where people use it. This is the point of Google Plus - it's not a social network, but a unified Google identity to tie all of your search and indeed internet use together in a Google database just like Pagerank.  

This is coupled with a steady move away from standards, just a little like the old Microsoft 'embrace and extend' (and of course 'extinguish'). There's a long list of Google projects that started out based on open standards and slowly turned into closed proprietary products. This is often from perfectly sound technical reasons, but it does make me wonder if Google will ever, out of a desire to innovate and make the product better, deprecate IMAP access to Gmail, for example. And of course Google, like Microsoft, would be totally confident this was the right thing for users. 

At times this self-confidence can be somewhat comical. Larry Page appeared to claim that any laws over 50 years old shouldn't apply to internet companies, for example. And attacking Microsoft for not being interoperable enough in instant messaging would have been more convincing if Google had not, 30 minutes earlier, announced a new IM product that abandons interoperability standards. This lack of self-awareness - criticising other companies for things Google does too - risks putting people's backs up, but on the other hand 20 years of geek hatred of Microsoft didn't do it any harm. 

I also had a powerful sense of the absurdity of piecemeal attempts to attack parts of the Google franchise head-on. You need a powerful franchise of your own on which to build an alternative vision. After all, parts of Google's actual execution can be pretty patchy, and Apple, Facebook and Amazon have strengths of their own (as well as weaknesses). I'm also unconvinced that Google can win against some category-killers, such as in messaging (Microsoft never had much impact on Quicken despite years of efforts, for example). But coming from outside with a me-too product is a complete waste of time.

Coincidentally, Lotus 1-2-3 was finally shut down this week.