Good point – OEMs will be reluctant to see core apps replaced due to liabilities and brand dilution.

However, OEMs should be able to allow 3rd party core apps (calendar, contacts, inbox, etc) to be developed as premium content (selected content only) and downloaded via an app store. This will allow a new type of content – what we ‘ve called ‘UI personalities’ to be created (see earlier article). A market of this type is already established in Japan by the 3 major operators.

Andreas

I indeed believe the boundary between Core and Download apps is reducing at least in term of integration capability and UX. I-Phone is definitely a good example for this. (although facilitated by supporting only one form factor/kind of device).

Opening all the phone environment (phone book, calendar) to 3rd parties is indeed not without risk for OEMs both from a security viewpoint and you rightly pointed this out. I see another reason for OEM to be reluctant: Ability to differentiate.

Do you see Nokia, Samsung and co leaving the core-apps ground to generic-UI/3rd-party-branded apps?

I don’t see that happening yet and I’m as such still curious on the evolution, deployment and flavours of Android at top OEMs. I believe fragmentation risk is high.

Stephane

The ‘power apps’ moniker unfortunately is a poor one at explaining what facilities/flexibility/APIs/etc make the app special. The one objective metric to use for ‘power apps’ is the % portion of the user journey, but no one in the industry publishes accurate data so far – and as such I could not argue in favour or against media players being ‘power apps’.

The idle screen should increasingly ‘consume’ more and more data (service status, ads, device info, user info, etc). But that doesn’t mean that calendar info will end up exclusively on the idle screen. There will always be a many-to-many relationship between data sources and apps which mashup that data. So the calendar-on-steroids app will also include location, contacts info, mashed with event info, network plans info (e.g. you are eligible for an update in 1 month), etc.

Overall I see the calendar app as a ‘power app’ as the time-based view (what you can do today, tomorrow and what you did last month) to be an underserved one with little innovation to date; yet there is a clear need as time is the fundamental variable by which we perceive our environment (maybe I ‘m getting to scientific now

Andreas

- Given the rise in media consumption, wouldn’t a media player, especially one that integrated well with popular media sources on the internet be one of the “power apps”?

- You mentioned location apps of the future having many views. An alternate view would be to think of location apps as continuing to be map based but location (esp current location) could be an important piece of contextual information that can be used to enhance other apps.

- Is the Calendar likely to graduate into playing such a significant role, given its current insignificance (it doesn’t merit mention in the “user journey” diagram)…I think that some of the functionality mentioned in Calendar 2.0 will actually end up in the Idle Screen app.

See http://www.hellosonar.com/ for another example of innovation in this space.

The diagram is an illustration of a simplified user journey, but not an actual or ‘average’ user journey. We ‘ve omitted most apps to demonstrate the concept. In practice there are high 10s of apps in a phone.

Andreas

why? does it just represent the core apps?

Pero creo que la guía de contactos, la agenda y la localización son los campos más prometedores. Simplemente porque así es como los humanos concebimos el mundo: por la gente, el tiempo y los lugares que nos rodean. Vía |Vision Mobile

notables diferencias en las dos visiones ofrecidas y, en cierto modo, son un ejemplo del camino que falta por recorrer para acercar las necesidades e intereses de los usuarios al ritmo de la extensa y compleja industria de los móviles. Son datos significativos que,sumados a otras aportaciones, pueden orientar algunas líneas de investigación que es necesario abordar desde la experiencia del usuario de dispositivos móviles. Aquí os dejo el extracto del punto 4 del Manifiesto. Cuestiona la estrategia seguida en la era