We learned a lot about mobile app usage from #Homescreen in 2015 but it’s time to apply that knowledge to other projects here at betaworks.
A few weeks into the New Year, some of you may be expecting the results of betaworks’ #Homescreen2015 survey, or even dusting off your own #Homescreen app to post a screenshot of all the coolest apps you added over the holiday break and those cold three day weekends. Unfortunately, neither the survey nor the app are available this year, as we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down the #Homescreen service altogether.
If you’ve been actively using the app or have been reading our blog posts, you’ll know that we ran into significant headwinds from Apple late this past summer. In fact, Apple removed us from the App Store in August, expressing concerns that we were circumventing or even replicating the App Store itself. Of course, neither of those concerns was warranted, but we made little progress engaging Apple in order to find areas of mutual understanding.
We spent much of the intervening time exploring new directions for the service both with the iOS app and outside of it. On the product front, these included a developer-focused app, a bot to capture home screen images from Twitter, various (mobile) web optimized experiences, exploring Android, and more. We also explored a number of partnership opportunities where Billboard-style #Homescreen Charts or #Homescreen certified stickers would be of value. We spoke with a lot of companies, some focused on community-based product discovery, others on image recognition technology, and a great number of business intelligence/analytics services.
However, in the end, none of these new directions warranted continued investment in and development of #Homescreen. A service for iOS app sharing and discovery without its own viable iOS app simply seemed too far-fetched to the majority of our community.
Crucially, though, this is one of the biggest benefits of operating within the betaworks studio model. We are able to move on from #Homescreen without it running it as a zombie company until the bank account runs dry. We are also able to apply the numerous lessons learned from #Homescreen to various new and ongoing projects here at the studio and across the broader betaworks network.
To that end, I’d like to share just a few of the lessons we’ll be taking with us from our experience with #Homescreen:
1. Platforms are exerting stifling control over mobile — With the exception of Facebook, the mobile OS makers now also dominate the application layer, just as Microsoft did with Windows in the 90s. Consolidation is likely to continue and growing an audience likely to become more difficult (I’d highly recommend reading Gilad’s entire piece).
2. Apps (and, by extension, homescreens) are becoming less important — Even though we’re spending more and more time on connected, mobile devices, we’re concentrating that time into fewer and fewer channels. The rise of messaging apps, in which all kinds of content can be consumed, is just one of many corollaries to this trend. There are a number of other innovative means through which content and communications are bypassing the standalone application. In October, betaworks hosted a summit on the notification layer and we’re continuing to learn, build, and invest in areas such as: Slack bots, ‘invisible’ apps, wearables, universal keyboards, and audio. In these contexts, the 28 icons on your phone’s first screen become far less meaningful. In fact, maybe that space should be optimized in entirely different ways.
3. Lockscreen (or Invisible Screen) is the new Homescreen? — Taking the above comments further, the new ‘window into our digital lives’ may actually be our phone’s lock screen. Alternatively, our own Matt Hartman has coined the term Hidden Homescreen. At the very least, the next generation of ‘native’ content will have to be more flexible, convenient, contextually relevant, and seamless to our lives. We call this type content Thin Media and it finds us instead of making us look for it
Finally, we’d just like to say thank you to all of the dedicated users of #Homescreen over the past 16 months. We wish the story did not end this way but are excited to take on the next challenge armed with all we have learned. We’re thrilled to see #Homescreen referenced and inspiring others to this day and look forward to whatever comes next. 2016 should surely prove to be wild and fun ride in the tech world!