Mobile Multitasking and Android

These days we want our phones to do as much as possible. Not only do we want our phones to replace our MP3 players and cameras but we want to be able to use gmail, twitter, watch videos, read news, and do banking while we are on the go. However there is one problem: smart phones suck at doing all of these things at once! I want to be able to receive a phone call while I’m listening to music, answer a text message with information copied out of gmail or a web browser while in the middle of using Google maps. However to switch back and forth between all of these apps is slow and cumbersome which means I probably won’t do it unless I have to.

This poor multitasking experience is currently holding back the mobile internet and the widespread usage of many applications. Sure you may have a twitter application on your phone already, but how long does it take you to stop what you are currently doing, open up twitter, send a tweet, close the application and get back to what you were doing before? The platform which is first to focus on multitasking and make it a central part of their OS will be the leader in the coming generation of phone applications. As existing tasks on smart phones become quicker to execute, it raises the bar on how much the average smart phone user can accomplish while on the go.

I have owned an Android phone for a little over a year now and I even have a bit of experience on the development side of the platform. I am going to discuss a couple of easy ways that Android could be changed to enable users to accomplish more with their devices. The cool thing about Android is that it is open source so it is actually possible to submit your own changes and have them pushed into a mod of the platform (such as Cyanogen), or possibly even the main commercial distribution.

Fast Task Switching

Pressing the HOME key on Android should immediately bring up a task switcher which switches between applications that the user is actively using. This would let users quickly move back and forth between their current tasks with a single button push!

Currently the HOME key takes you to the main screen of the phone where you can use widgets or launch another application. You CAN bring up a task switcher dialog by pressing and holding the home key for a few seconds but the menu that comes up is just a list of the six most recently used applications rather than just the ones you are actively using. I would argue that the main reason people press the HOME key is to change their current task and the function of the button should be changed to match.

Notification Profiles

An application can use many ways to get your attention when your phone is in your pocket or on the table. This includes playing sounds, flashing an LED, vibrating, and displaying icons on the screen. Android really needs a central notification system that manages how all applications alert you of events (i.e. text messages and emails). This system should be designed such that it automatically alerts you differently when you are at home, on the bus, at school, or at work. This can be accomplished by applying heuristics which take into account information such as the location and the orientation of your phone.

The problem is that with many applications (gmail, twitter, facebook, text messaging, phone calls, calendar alerts) raising events to to user, is that eventually it all becomes noise. To make things worse, you have to go into each application to change how it notifies you, making it almost impossible to customize how you get alerts when you move around. By hooking into a central framework the notification settings for all applications can be available in one convenient place. The result is that all of a sudden you want to use all of those applications that had previously just annoyed you with constant buzzing!

This idea could be extended so that the entire phone centers its user experience around locational heuristics, which is a great idea in theory but requires careful research and execution to be successful.

All smart phones will have to have good multitasking to be successful in the consumer market, so why not start working on it now?