New problems with moving

Note: Smartphone development has entered its 7th year, it has accelerated complexity in three areas: first, the user from the production of the family to almost everyone, the second is the Internet terminal from the PC into mobile devices, the third is the continuation of the 20-year simple web browser, mouse keyboard model into a complex multi-layer model. What will happen to the future of mobile ecology? Benedict Evans raised his own new problems in the field.

Smartphones have entered their 7th year, with old questions or answers or outdated, and new problems emerge.

The first phase of the platform battle has been concluded: Both Apple and Google have won. Apple wins with quality and Google wins by volume. The world sells around 1.8 billion handsets (including feature handsets) each year, with Apple getting 10% of its share (high-end), while Android gets 50% of its share. About 2/3 of Android's shares are outside China, using Google Android, while China accounts for another 1/3, not Google Android. Mobile phone sales are expected to reach 4, 500 million units in the next quarter, and almost all are smartphones. and the global number of mobile phones will reach 4 billion. And while Apple's sales are only a small fraction, the positioning of Apple's handsets and Apple's ability to execute means that Apple has a bigger share of the flow and much of its content and e-commerce revenues in developed markets, so Apple's ecosystem is sustainable and so is Google. So what happens next?

Changes in Android OEM

Samsung is changing the size of the Android market and getting almost all of its profits. The spoiler is not a traditional manufacturer, but the rise of Chinese brands. Chinese brands are dominating the domestic market. How will the future be developed? Will the millet stream build one of the brands around the world? How many local brands will emerge? Will other Chinese OEMs do the same thing? Terminals have always been a game of scale, but can small local brands rely on the size of the entire Shenzhen ecosystem rather than the size of their own development to play the game? Can anyone finally replace Apple in the high-end market?

Where does Android go?

A company like Millet points to the second Android problem. What is-android going to become?

So far, "non-Google" Android has been largely constrained by two sides. One is that Google is largely absent from the Chinese market, so there is no Google service on almost all of China's Android devices, but this is not a broader strategic issue for Google. The second is that Amazon is trying to make a start on the Kindle Fire product line, but the fire tablet is just a niche product, and Fire Phone is underperforming, in part because of the lack of Google services. Meanwhile, efforts by mainstream Android OEMs to increase their differentiated layers on Android have largely failed.

But things have changed a little bit now. One is the millet overlay differential layer of effort seems to be quite fruitful. So far, the use of Google services outside China is good, but it may not last long. Cyanogen, on the other hand, creates space for more corporate experimentation on what Android is.

The key to Google's control of Android is Google Play Service. Google's use of the APIs and apps placed on Android is the same as Microsoft's use of Office and Windows-a pair of leveraged levers that means it must be bundled with the Android phone.

The usual assumption is that it is impossible to sell handsets outside China that do not have Google Maps and app stores, which are no different from essentially functional handsets. But in fact no one has actually tried to do that except Amazon. At present, there are indications that Google Maps on iOS is very low usage. This may be because many of Google's mobile services have a wide range of customer base, but not enough thickness. And as the mainstream Android OEM, which tries to sell "official" Android, has no money on the whole, and with the growing number of small manufacturers relying on Shenzhen (which don't have much of a loss if Google doesn't make their own version of it in the future), more people will try.

This raises a deeper question of Android-what will Google do in 5 years? Will a chrome phone make Android the legacy system? Google has made the effort to make Android run on Chrome (and vice versa), is this the development trend of Google's future platform? If so, does this mean that other people trying to build their own platforms on this basis are more or less constrained?

Interaction patterns, messages, and aggregation layers

The reason Google adjusts Android is partly to control, but the deeper reason is that it's like changing the smartphone's interactive model. Obviously, app has always been a structural problem for Google because its content is invisible to search and, more importantly, is not linked to search results, whether it's paid or free content. For a variety of reasons, the HTML5 "web App" is proving to be out of line, but the underlying problem with the app is that it can be linked to any resource on the Web, but not at the mobile end, and everything is in an isolated island.

The solution to this problem remains elusive. One answer may be to return to the Web, and apparently Android 5 (Lollipop) tries to blur the differences between app and web attempts. The answer, however, is still unknown: technology tends to move forward, causing new problems while solving old problems, but generally not going back to old solutions and old problems. We didn't solve the web problem by rebuilding AOL, it was Google and Facebook.

But Google's search patterns created on the Web do not work on the mobile side-Mobile is a combination of "post-Netscape" and "post-PageRank". But under the same pattern, Google's web as a lost paradise before the fall of humanity still has a lot of problems.

Now the aggregation and discovery layer is changing, from everything bundled in a Web browser and then through Google (which is bundled) to a app icon that binds content from the Web. At the same time app binds to all the content of a Web site, making it impossible to link directly to a particular page. So we now have deep links that allow you to access chimneys (islands), as well as a wealth of operational notices to extract the content from isolated islands. We also have cards that appear everywhere (provided in different ways) as a metaphor for another solution bundle.

This, in turn, raises new problems. Deep links don't necessarily fit the app's interactive model, but it's not clear who should do it-should it be on top (Google on Facebook or iOS) or the platform owner develop it? At the same time, notifications have become a new stream of messages, and the message boards on iOS and Android have begun to overwhelm.

This reminds me of Zawinski's law, if someone extends e-mail to include messages: Every program tries to expand to read e-mail. And those that cannot do will be replaced.

China is now taking the message as a new mode of interaction (sic). Applications there are migrating the aggregation and discovery layers from the App Store and the home screen to the Internet Platform provider's app (although there are still 5, 6 app stores on Android). That is, the content on the Web browser is unbound, but now it's in the app, and it's actually a new binding, and then it's again in the form of messages and notifications, and then it's tied to the message application or notification panel. It doesn't even take into account emails and slack (the workflow is removed from the email and then moved to the app to notify you). So, the question is, how many times does this app/web/in and out of the mail/message?

Facebook and Amazon

We mentioned a question before whether the basic platform-level interaction pattern would be changed by a third party, or that only Apple and Google could do it. But Amazon and Facebook can play a role if they want to. The Web browser is a neutral, no intermediary platform, but the smartphone is not. What the platform owner does affects the discovery and interaction of everything. That's why Android exists, and Google is afraid of what Microsoft might do, and that's why Facebook and Amazon are eyeing the interactive model with Firephone and Facebook home. So far, they have not been able to find the doorway to the entire technology stack at the gatekeeper level (control the main screen of the aggregation layer) found their own existence, but these players will not give up the effort. Facebook is now trying to build a meta layer (Meta-layer) over Android and iOS, making it possible for deep links and job sharing within applications. How far can Facebook go? Does this (or more generally, deep links) have to be built by the average owner? What is Amazon going to do next, as well as search and link business?

Wearable-endpoints of clouds and messages

The last question is wearable. At least for now, wearable is the endpoint of the cloud service, but the watch, given its limited screen size, can probably only serve as a message and notification device. If wearable technology is going to take off, it is also about responding to a more generalized problem, that is, what the broader interaction pattern should be, and where messages and notices should be placed. Further, things like Oculus and especially Magic Leap are likely to make more fundamental changes to the popular mode of interaction, but it is still premature.

Scale

But what's more, now that we have about 2 billion smartphone users, nearly 4 billion have mobile phones, and the future is estimated to have 35 to 4 billion smartphone users. This is impressive compared to 1.6 billion PCs, half of which are corporate users-5 times times the number of smartphone consumers, and these devices are essentially inseparable from the user, with a variety of apps and sensors, more complex than the PC, and should be considered as Internet equipment.

It's hard to describe how big this change is. For the first time in history, the technology industry has sold things to 4/5 of the world's adults, with the exception of big businesses or the middle class-to sell to people who have no water or electricity, and to save money for cigarettes to move. This means accelerating complexity in three ways: from a home to a person, from a PC to a mobile, from a 20-year web browser, a simple mouse-keyboard model to a complex multi-layer device, and everything is changing. And that's where the fun is.