Aadil Mamujee

I spent some time writing down some of the things that bother me about using my mobile phone, and thought I would share some improvements that I think would make using my phone even better. Apple’s IOS 8 and Google’s Kit Kat are addressing much of it.

• Web links over email and text – There should be a way for the OS or browser to detect whether or not an app is installed and try to open up the app (deep linked), resorting to the web view only if opening up the app fails. This would provide a better experience for user as well as an opportunity to increase app engagement, and should become standard very quickly. I think this could work by the browser going to the website and the website creating a custom deep linked url that it tries to open through the app; if it fails, then it goes to the web view. There might be a cleverer way to do it though. It’s surprising to me that apps like LinkedIn don’t work this way – I often get a link to someone’s profile and it’ll never redirect to the app – this should be the defacto, not a crappy mobile web view that requires login, etc.
• Method of for applications to talk to each other – IOS and Android need to define an app API with a common set of things as well as custom calls that can allow apps to talk to each other in real time and share data. This would allow aggregators to become much more powerful on mobile and other apps that pull in data from multiple apps in real time, and will open up a whole new class of application. This may currently be solvable by creating server APIs, but it’s less easy than apple or google creating a common format that can be shared locally.  An example of a use case would be getting transport from A->B and an aggregator showing me the best option from uber, lyft, taxi, bus etc.
• Search in-app content – I should be able to search on my home screen for content embedded within apps / over search. I.e., Searching on my phone should be much more powerful and personalized than it is now. It’ll be a little complicated to figure out the balance of showing content that is local vs. online or layering in additional data (e.g. what apps I use most) in the ranking system, but these are likely solvable problems. e.g. I should be able to search for ski trip and the results are a combination of texts, email, evernote, etc. Google is far ahead of Apple here but IOS 8 is starting to bridge the gap
• Wearables as an input/sensor – The future of wearables is collecting data that your phone is ill suited to collect and then either having its own ability to transmit data to a server or using the phone/internet connection on the phone to crunch the data and transmit data to the user through the wearable in a format that makes sense. The synergy between the 2 devices (phone + wearable) is where I think things get very interesting because then the size of wearables can go vastly down (lower power consumption, less high tech, smaller size).
• Seamless transfer from web<=>mobile– Products that have websites and apps should have a common backend that allows you to pick up on your app where you left off on your computer and vice versa. Examples are yelp or google maps. Again I think android is far ahead of iOS if you’re a power user of google products.