Design Project: iOS for Invisible Apps

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Now, we’re entering the age of apps as service layers. These are apps you have on your phone but only open when you know they explicitly have something to say to you. They aren’t for ‘idle browsing’, they’re purpose built and informed by contextual signals like hardware sensors, location, history of use and predictive computation.

[ Update: Apple more or less announced interactive widgets today, which is the main idea of this post. The key difference is that all apps in iOS 8 still require a spot on your home screen, which may no longer be necessary in my opinion.]

Following the recent release of Swarm from Foursquare, TechCrunch published an article about the rise of “invisible apps.” As the quote above suggests, we’ve entered a point in mobile where not every app needs a spot on your home screen or even a full-screen UI. It’s a good thing too, since the average iPhone user reportedly has over 100 apps installed . The rise of connected devices will only make this more painful for users. Do I really need a different app on my phone for my light bulbs, my doorbell, and my egg tray ?

Different Kinds of Invisible Apps

Even in these early stages, you can see a couple different kinds of invisible apps emerging. There are notification-driven apps like Breeze or Swarm that use contextual data to decide when to deliver relevant information like progress to a steps goal, or friends in the area. Passbook is an excellent example. It’s rarely necessary to launch the Passbook app—but it’s damn handy when it shows up on your lock screen.

There are also “share and collect” apps, like Pocket, Buffer, and Evernote. As a reading app, Pocket makes sense under the home screen strategy. But the other half of Pocket’s functionality—saving and tagging articles from other apps—is a hassle if you haven’t gone through the process of setting up their bookmark shortcut. Similarly, adding links to Buffer is tricky if it’s not built into the originating app. These apps should exist largely as extensions to any share sheet across iOS.

Lastly, there are compatibility apps like WinZip or RAW photo file readers that allow your device to access additional filetypes. They’re more like iOS plugins than standalone apps. Wallpaper apps, lock screen enhancers, and secret folder apps also fall into this category.

The problem is that all of these products are required to design an icon, 727,000 pixels of real estate, and a full app UX. They make a user contemplate which folder or home screen the app belongs in. This results in wasted cycles for developers, potential bloat in the app, and poor user experience.

So I started wondering: what would a version of iOS look like that’s built for these invisible apps?

Something New, But Familiar: App Cards

Where do invisible apps live? In OS X, many of them end up in the menubar, but there’s no room for that in iOS. I looked at the existing invisible apps on my phone to see what was absolutely essential. I counted all the apps on my phone that could (or should) become invisible: Passbook, Game Center, LevelUp, Chromecast, and even Phone—which I primarily open when people call me, or via Siri—and thought about when and how I interact with them. I looked at how Apple has changed Notification Center in iOS 7, creating a whole new top layer for delivering information primarily through text.

Then I looked at Siri, a wonderful example of an invisible app. Siri has no home screen icon, but it’s always just a long press or gesture away. It gets full screen real estate, but rarely fills the space. The focal content sits on top of the standard blur shade from Notification Center. This was my starting point: why not let invisible apps deliver richer content in Notification Center as “app cards?”

Imagine for a moment that Facebook had a perfect algorithm that knew when there was content you wanted to read. Now imagine you could get more than a one-line preview and even interac t with that content without actually launching Facebook. That’s the basic premise of app cards. More than a notification, but less than an app.

I’m a huge fan of Breeze, the new step counting app from the RunKeeper team, but it’s not on my home screen. It’s on my rarely visited second page of apps. Still, I’m constantly interacting with it and I never quit the app. I get encouraging little push notifications after I go for a walk, or when the apps thinks I should get out and move around. What if Breeze had more than just text at its disposal for those notifications?

The TechCrunch article suggests that Foursquare is on its way to having the confidence in its location data to achieve accurate passive check-ins. When that becomes the case, you won’t need to launch the app when you walk into a restaurant anymore. The new plans feature in Swarm shows lots of promise, and makes a great example of the kind of elevated interaction possible an an app card:

And for those share and collect apps, let’s just put them where they belong:

New Challenges

App cards don’t have to be exclusive to invisible apps. They offer great lightweight interaction at key moments for any app. As with any new content delivery platform, however, there is a risk of abuse. Apps could be too pushy or serve ads with app cards. This can’t be avoided, and we just have to hope that best practices for a good user experience win the day.

Notification Center (and thereby app cards) are accessible without unlocking a phone. I wouldn’t want to run to the next room and have people replying to messages or turning up my thermostat. My hope is that increased usage of biometric security measures (Touch ID, facial recognition) allow for a “background unlock” that don’t interrupt the user experience.

Invisible apps raise new UX questions. How would invisible apps get installed? How do you quit them? Do they have an onboarding? The App Store could carve out an “invisible apps” section (Apple would have a better term for it). Invisible apps could be managed in the Settings app—where most other apps already dump their acknowledgements and reset buttons—and fit nicely into iOS’s existing app switch functionality:

[Updated] Apple is fully aware of the accelerating rate of app installs, and they are already working to address it: folders in iOS 7 are no longer limited to 12 apps. The announcement at WWDC 2014 of interactive notifications and third party widgets bring more engagement out of apps themselves, which is great. However, as the definition of “what an app is” evolves and UX becomes more contextual, iOS must continue to iterate and account for the various use cases that arise. iOS 8 is getting all the attention this week, but I’m already wondering what’s going to be in iOS 9.

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Adam Sigel is a product manager at InsightSquared. He lives in Boston.

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