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Are you still clicking on apps on your phone? That’s so 2016. Notifications are the new apps, bots are the new notifications, and the way you use your smartphone is likely to change as much over the next five years as it has over that past five.
That’s the outcome of changes to iOS and Android which make it easier than ever to have complex interactions with your phone even when the screen is locked. Now app developers are catching on.
Nic Newman, of the University of Oxford, says that the changes have sparked a “battle for the lock screen”, with apps, particularly those from media companies, fighting to live in your notifications in the same way they once competed for limited space on the phone’s homescreen.
The key driver of the change was the launch of iOS 9, back in 2015. This gave iPhones the ability to, say, mark an email as read, or reply to a text, from the lock screen, without having to open the app itself – something Android users were already familiar with.
In Britain today, around a quarter of smartphone users get news alerts through their phones, according to Newman’s study. But in other nations, that figure is larger: 40% of Taiwanese users have news alerts on their phones, and 33% of US users do.
Just as the battle for the lock screen was started by the update to iOS 9 and the new tools it offered developers, so too will last September’s iOS 10 have ramifications for how you use your phone that we are only just starting to see today. Notifications in iOS 10 can contain rich media, such as audio and even video, sent straight to the lock screen. Information is no longer just available at the touch of a button, but can be absorbed at the glance of a smartphone screen.
But not everyone wants to play ball. Companies such as Facebook and China’s WeChat are fighting to create their own ecosystems, free from the control – and revenue cuts – of Apple and Google, the company that makes Android. They are moving ahead with their own version of the future, one which pumps all notifications through their messaging services in the form of simple (and increasingly not simple, but conversational) chatbots.
Chinese WeChat users can now do almost everything they would have once done online through the messaging app instead – turning their WeChat inbox into a new hybrid of the notifications screen, app home screen, and inbox. They can send money to friends, watch films and order pizzas, all without leaving the app. Facebook has seen what they are doing, and is trying to bring the same model to the west.
The battle for the lock screen has barely begun, but brace yourself for the battle of the bots.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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How apps plan to conquer your phone's lock screenhttps://goo.gl/KHl1HZ
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