Tom Hume

We're having an interesting experience at the moment with "operator app stores". We've submitted our Guardian Anywhere app to a couple of them. It's a fairly popular app: 60,000+ downloads, 4.5 star rating, 27,280 active installs and well over 2 million copies of the Guardian delivered through it.

I won't name names. Let's call the operators concerned A and B.

Initial reaction from A when we submitted the app was to reject it, because A can (I quote) "already supply news feeds through its own and third-party services and there is no additional requirement for these type of products".

We've since resubmitted it to A, through their portal which they're using to liaise with folks like ourselves. We submitted it on 30th March, and their site says it should go through in 10 working days. As of the end of May, it wasn't live and the folks at A weren't able to say when it might be (the connection their UK application shop wasn't "live").

Operator B, on the other hand, rejected our submission "due to your app containing ads or links of any sort, which is currently prohibited for applications held within B's app store". I'm still picking pieces of my jaw off my desk.

We have no advertising or other revenue tied to this product - I'm not moaning because we're out of pocket, and my interest in getting this sort of distribution is purely to compare operator app stores to the Android Marketplace.

But it feels like operators are repeating mistakes they should've learned from 5 years ago, and aren't learning from the success of app stores. Launching through them is a cumbersome process with hefty manual reviews and curation. Even a manual review process from Apple doesn't take 3 months, reject your app for containing links, or say "no thanks" because they already have an app in your category.

Update: I've been working on mobile so long that I'm quite bored of operator-bashing. After seeing quite a few folks pick up on this and get busy kicking the operators, I thought I'd try and be a bit more constructive.

I think it all comes down to clear communication: anyone distributing apps should say, clearly and concisely, in a single place, what their standards for accepting and rejecting apps are; what apps they are and aren't interested in; and what their timescales for launch will really be. And then stick to them.

I was feeling a bit twitchy about not having written any code for a while, and I wanted to fiddle with the Songkick API. On discovering that there didn't seem to be any Java libraries for it, I thought I'd write one. Here it is; it's quite limited at the moment (only does Event, Artist and Location searches), but I'm adding to it every now and then and maybe you'll find it useful.

I had the good fortune to imbibe a double-dose of Sherry Turkle this week; Kate and I saw her present at the LSE on Thursday evening, then crept to the British Library on Friday to see her in a panel discussion with John Naughton, Aleks Krotoski and Nick Tyler.

As usual, I was late to the party - never having heard of Sherry until Roman Verostko quoted her in a chat about algorithmic art earlier this year: "We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with". That quote led me, via a few other conversations, to the copy of Evocative Objects which sits, sadly unread, on my bedside table; and to her recent book Alone Together - which she billed on Friday as a Bowling Alone for digital natives.

I took some reasonable notes on the Thursday evening; unfortunately everything I was carrying with me ran out of power towards the end of Friday, forcing me to rely on my memory to deliver impressions of the event. Some scattered scribblings:

• Back at MIT, Sherry and many others went on a 3 day retreat to consider what home computers would mean. Aside from the gaming possibilities (which everyone agreed were clear), few applications were proposed. Calendaring and address books were brought up and rejected as stupid; no-one thought that anyone other than academics would use them for writing; tax preparation was floated as another possible application: "People stayed for 2 days and 5 meals, but there weren't many ideas".
• Once they're networked, computers keep us busy: "We are their killer app;
• Whilst her book Life on the Screen was optimistic, seeing online as a useful playground for identity, she failed to see that we would want to live simultaneously on and offline, and want to "bail out of reality" to visit virtual places. Aleks picked up on this concern about bailing out of reality; during the panel discussion when Sherry brought it up in the context of 15-year olds avoiding awkward encounters with the opposite sex, Aleks pointed out that they were having analogous experiences of awkwardness online and that they weren't therefore missing out on the experience completely;
• "Technology is seductive when its affordances meet our vulnerabilities", "social robots deceive us into loving them: it turns out we are cheap dates", "connectivity offers the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy", and "we can't get enough of each other if we can keep each other at a distance we control";
• It's not just about the young: 30-50somethings exhibit the same behaviour of avoiding perceived risks of real-time contact in favour of asynchronous communication like SMS or email;
• Sherry finds the addiction metaphor applied to technology unhelpful: we can't lose technology in the way you might cure an addiction by avoiding a drug. Instead she advocated a dieting metaphor, and later referenced some of the debates we are having (societally) about fast food as a useful example of the kind of debate we should have around online privacy. "Just because we grew up with the Internet, we assume the Internet has grown up", she says, optimistic about our ability to have such a debate at what is still an early stage of online communications,;
• She was emphatic about the need for online privacy and deplored the attitudes of some technologists towards its unimportance: "Everyone should have something to hide";
• When applied to computer technology, transparency used to mean "having a full understanding of how the system works"; where computer literacy once meant knowing the engine, now it means understanding applications and explicitly avoiding the internals, "and that's a travesty";

One refrain from Sherry which I had trouble finding evidence for was the notion that solitude is, in and of itself, energising and nourishing. It seemed to be a belief she held strongly, but unlike much of her other (plainly well-researched) material she didn't provide much backing for this point. Whilst instinctively I'm inclined to agree with her, I'd like to see some evidence for the psychological value of solitude; or is it just something which a generation pre-Internet naturally acclimatised to, that digital natives have never needed?

During the panel discussion, I think it was Sherry who brought up the example of people texting one another at funerals (as a demonstration of the sinister reach of technology into inappropriate places). An interesting little back-chat on Twitter kicked off, with one poster pointing out that 30 years ago the idea of playing pop music at funerals would have been anathema, where now it's reasonable (to some, at least). "Is this not standard generational moral panic?", someone in the audience asked... and whilst I'd left the talk on Thursday generally agreeing with Sherry, I left Friday less sure. How can we possibly be objective about technology, or is it not, as someone else in the audience pointed out, "a failure of perspective to consider humans and technology as separate"?

So, it's out there! One of the apps that's been keeping many of us busy over the last few months has shipped: the official app for Glastonbury Festival.

We won the pitch to Orange with a straightforward concept. We know that there are a set of things people would expect from any Glastonbury app, like up-to-date listings and a map of the site - it's important to do a great job on these. Even though line-ups get printed and handed out at site entry, they're frequently revised up to the last minute. A paper guide wouldn't get you to, say, the secret gig Radiohead did in 2010.

And we also know that tickets sell out every year: despite being the biggest festival in the world there's an audience for Glastonbury that experiences it through the BBC coverage, the music press, or late-night texts from friends - instead of actually being there. So we wanted to launch an app that would hold your hand if you were lucky enough to be staggering around on-site, but also give the folks who didn't make it there something too - even if it was just a growing sense of jealousy between 22nd and 26th June. Tying into Facebook is a bit of a cliché in the world of mobile apps, but here it's exactly the right thing to do.

Between the FPers who'd spent previous summers at the festival, there was a strong feeling that we should be realistic, too. The day or so of battery life modern smartphones give their owner is doubly precious when she can't charge overnight; despite the valiant efforts of Orange, connectivity is at a premium on-site; and persuading festival-goers to spend time staring at their mobile screens instead of enjoying the delights of Glastonbury seemed a bit... well, unfair.

Thinking about battery life; minimising use of the network; prioritising clear use cases; connecting people. Sound familiar? In many ways Glastonbury is just an extreme testbed for the constraints of mobile which we've been working with since day one.

If you want to see what we've done, the best thing might be for you to get the app: it's available from the iTunes Store, the Android Marketplace and through the Ovi Store. As you might guess from our name, we believe strongly that if you're delivering a mass-market app, you should often "go broad" and reach as wide an audience as possible: apps aren't just for iPhone owners, and we were chuffed to have Orange agree with us on this. So you can get the Glastonbury app on iPhones, iPod touches, Android smartphones (320x480 and up), and a pile of Nokia devices that support Qt.

If you can't be bothered to go and download the app, the key features are:

• A lush EPG which grabs line-ups (and changes) efficiently, stores them on your phone and lets you pan through them with ease - even if you're not online;
• A personal itinerary for the festival, which you fill with your favourite acts, and with alarms to remind you when they're on;
• Full site maps, that show you where you are right now. It's a big old place, and easy to get lost;
• Easy boasting, err sharing, of events through Facebook - so you can tell everyone back home exactly what they're missing. Dancing your wellies off in a muddy corner? THEY NEED TO KNOW!
• A live heat-map to tell you where the action is, right now (even if you're off-site) - we fill this with the mood data gathered when you share on Facebook. This sort of thing is quite novel. We hope it'll be useful, but at worst it'll be an interesting experiment in crowd dynamics;
• A news section, which Orange will be updating before and during the event - worth keeping an eye on (and you can win a pair of tickets there now);

When it came to design, we were visually fortunate: the Orange and Guardian brands seemed like natural bedfellows, so we found ourselves focusing on giving the app the Orange "feel". The icon is a chromatic microcosm of the whole app: that little rainbow gives us the colour-scheme for everything you see after you've tapped it. And the dark colours and background? That's a favour for those of you with OLED screens, which use much less power when displaying black.

The map had a lot of attention: we're using high-contrast stage names and have a subtle stroke around the labels to keep them legible on a small screen, in much the same way as Google Maps does. Some early research into wayfinding also informed the look and feel of the map, inspired by signage. We have lots of respect for the work CityID have done in this area too...

But for us, the centre of the app is the EPG: in early workshops the Clashfinder service was mentioned several times as being popular, and when we looked into it we were sure that the personalised nature of Clashfinder was the reason for this. Who wants to wander around Somerset carrying reams of listings for bands they don't care about? So this, and the interfaces of PVRs, were inspirations for the EPG - and we sketched and prototyped it very early on. This hi-definition prototype we built (in HTML and CSS) was particularly fantastic to explain the workings of the EPG to Orange, and as a reference for our developers:

And of course, the app is available on three platforms - and we felt it was more important for us to take the users' view of things and keep it consistent with the rest of their phone, than keep it identical across devices. So you can see subtle differences between the screens: we use the hardware back button on Android, but have a back button top-left on iOS, say.

The normal way to go cross-platform is by using HTML5 and web technologies; but having done some experiments with these, we weren't convinced that they'd work for us. We wanted high-performance UI, lots of offline storage, lots of deep integration with handset features. Yes, technically you can do these things in a mobile web site, but getting them all working perfectly in a branded app is unexpectedly troublesome. We don't think the web is there yet, for this kind of product.

So Glastonbury 2011 is the first product we've launched publicly to pioneer a new approach - something I've alluded to in the past on this site, and will be talking about at Mobile 2.0 in June. We think it's a good way of combining the best of the web and the best of native - I'll leave it there for now but will be writing more about this later.

At the back-end, we're using Google Spreadsheets for a lot of the data management. Everyone understands how to work with spreadsheets; we think they provide a nice, simple CMS interface; and we have some technology that we've developed to sit between them and the mobile app and sync down changes, called ProxoCube.

A lot of hard work, including a few late nights, weekends and bank holidays, went into this product. It's the biggest thing we've done in some time, so credit due to the long list of folks behind it - which is everyone at FP.

To the team at FP: Adrian Bigland, Ben Carias, Ali Driver, Sergio Falletti, Matt Gaunt, Thom Hopper, Douglas Hoskins, James Hugman, Trevor May, John Revill, Cori Samuel, Tariq Tamuji, Dom Travers, and Paul Welsh - your names will echo through the hallways of history.

And thanks to Steve, Marianne and Adam at Orange, who've shepherded the product and kept us on the straight and narrow throughout :)