One area where I’ve been spending some time meeting companies and learning is in the broad area of Android UI customization. I’ve started to see a handful of companies providing interesting approaches to customizing the Android home screen UI as well as taking over the lockscreen to provide consumers with information or entertainment.
It’s not surprising to me that people are spending lots of time trying to own this real estate – it’s the first thing you see when you pick up or unlock your phone. According to one report, people swipe their phones 100 or more times per day. That’s a lot of views and time that nobody currently controls. And the opportunity to be the first thing that people see (or control the experience that they see) that many times for day is a really interesting opportunity for both startups and established companies and one that I expect to get more competitive in the near term. There are already a few startups tackling this space, namely Aviate, Cover, and Locket, along with a few other teams and companies that have not yet launched or publicly announced what they’re doing. And then there are some of the newer Android hardware devices that include things like Active Display Notifications that allow you to peek at incoming items without actually unlocking your phone.
The interesting thing to me is that I’ve seen three relatively distinct approaches around how to better use the homescreen and lockscreen real estate. I think they can all be successful but all have really different approaches and value proposition for consumers:
Ad-Driven Monetization Experiences
Many of these seem to be inspired by the Cash Slide experience in Korea, where consumers earn a small amount of money for swiping on ads or otherwise interacting with promoted content with the lockscreen. The primary hook or driver here is obvious – it’s a way for consumers to earn money (real or some form of reward currency) and there is already a pool of advertisers willing to get their marketing messages in front of consumers on that screen. The ultimate test of these models is whether customers will, in the long term, continue to have an interest in looking at ads or other promoted content and whether the companies providing this promoted content can have a good mixture between things that monetize well and things that engage the consumer.
Putting Social Front and Center
Another approach for building launcher and UI customization is Facebook Home. I think Facebook Home is still a very interesting experiment in how much persistent screen real estate and UI consumers are willing to give up in order to stay connected to the core Facebook experience. I think Facebook is out in front in terms of pushing the boundary of what’s possible here and I imagine they’re learning a lot about what consumers like and dislike about having a more pervasive social experience outside of the core application.
Beyond Facebook, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the more social applications on mobile (the new crop of messaging services, Twitter, the newest crop of photo services, etc) move toward making their product experiences more pervasive over time. And I would also expect some developers to start building social application experiences like Home that pull from multiple services.
Context and Content Driven Intelligence
The last major approach I see people taking is making the lock screen and overall layout smarter by taking into account context (location, upcoming meetings, interest, etc) and matching that with relevant content. That can include anything from using knowledge of my calendar to push me information that’s relevant for my next meeting even if my phone is locked (something richer than a simple push notification) to more complex scenarios like pushing me breaking news complete with video or imagery (as opposed to just a link in a push notification) when topics or interests I follow have meaningful updates. I think this is a really interesting area to explore, but it is also likely to push these companies toward the current arc of Google Now. For me, the big unanswered question is how hard Google will push Google Now to the forefront of the Android UI experience. Google Now already does a pretty good job on context and content but it’s not (yet) front and center in the Google experience. I read a good Ars Technica article on their take about how Google is beginning to push some of its services more to the forefront.
As always, comments are open or you can send me messages on Twitter @chudson.
Do you think google will/can let 3rd party own the most important part of real estate of the smartphone? when a clamp down on those?
I agree. How about search on mobile then?
I think the anti-trust implications of them shutting people out of that real estate would be very expensive.
that has nothing to do with anti trust. Google owns its operating system and can adapt rules to protect and garantee the user experience. they started to do so by removing tens of thousands of zombie apps, then recently by prohibiting ads via push but more importantly blocking apps that would drop app icons on the homescreen. See where this is going?
I actually expect them to push Google Now or Google Plus as the default loader / lockscreen experience over time, but I do think they are (and should) be worried about the implications of too tightly coupling their role in developing the OS with pushing their own apps.
well well, for now Google has enough time and cash and power to see that coming and startups around there will have to allocate massive legal fees to defend their case if any…i would not mess with the biggest piece of real estate on mobile (which is why btw Apple does not open it to developers) unless you want to be acquired by Google…which i am sure is on the agenda of those corps…
Google could afford to wait out a lot of the smaller companies. I also think that Samsung, LG, or HTC could also be in the market for one of these companies as they can actually provide distribution.
yup. that could happen but Samsung, LG or HTC are far from being ad companies and they would buy a feature not a business…which begs the question: are those services a business? or just a target for acquisition? oh and i forgot to precise: are they really useful? [in my experience they are not]
This is a fantastic post. In a way, it’s like 2-3 posts in one. First, while I like all the innovation in Android, I wonder — will it matter in the US right now, where iOS is picking up, and will users in other places be willing to pay for these kind of services? Two, I’d love to read more about your thoughts on Facebook Home — I, too, think it was step 1 and there’s a long way to go in forking or coopting Android.
Semil,
Thanks for the comment. I’ve been thinking more about Facebook Home and I want to write more about it. My gut says that they launched it a year too late based on end user engagement with the service. I think so many things that work in Asia eventually make their way here (F2P games, mobile messaging, stickers, etc) that those services will find an audience here.
FWIW, I think Amazon is tops when it comes to forking Android for private benefit.
Contextually recommended content presupposes many things as well as judges aspects of user behavior that’s quite inaccurate. The problem is when a platform only shows you content that’s it thinks is contextually relevant to you and masks the rest that you might want to browse. Unless these issues are smartly tackled, garnering massive usage for intelligent assisting apps/systems will take a while.