Yahoo Finance Confide and other mobile apps going back to the desktop
The disappearing-message app for business, Confide, made an unexpected announcement this week, offering users desktop software versions of the previously all-mobile service.
Instead of limiting the exchange of sensitive communications to smartphones and tablets, Confide, which launched its mobile app at the beginning of 2014, now also works across Macs and Windows PCs. All of the versions offer the same basic features, allowing colleagues or friends to chat privately via text that self-erases after being read.
Messages first appear on both the mobile app and desktop as a series of orange bars. On mobile, a user runs their finger across the screen to reveal the text. On the desktop, a user hovers their mouse over the message to reveal the entire text. In both, the text is destroyed after the message is closed.
"You want to be everywhere that your audience is," says Jon Brod, co-founder and president. "The percentage of digital life on the desktop is very meaningful. For a lot of people the center of gravity at the office is still the laptop."
And Brod is hardly alone. There have been a number of other prominent moves by mobile apps back to the desktop, including messaging apps WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, news reader Flipboard and productivity suite Quip.
The moves make sense because even though people are spending an increasing amount of time on their phones, they're also still spending quite a bit of time on old-fashioned laptop and desktop computers, as well. Growing mobile usage, it seems, is coming mainly from times when people used to be offline and disconnected, whether in line at the grocery store, watching TV or hanging out with friends.
Since 2008, the average amount of time people spend per day accessing the Internet on desktops has actually posted a modest increase of about 9%, according to famed analyst Mary Meeker's most recent annual report of online trends.
Of course, mobile usage has surged almost tenfold over the same period and finally eclipsed desktop usage last year. But with 42% of the action still happening on the desktop -- and an even higher proportion when people are work -- some app developers see a need to expand back to the desktop.
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The decision to offer desktop versions leads immediately to another critical question -- whether to create specific versions for Apple's (AAPL) Macs, PCs running Microsoft (MSFT) Windows and other platforms or, instead, create a single, universal version that runs on every operating system via a web browser.
Confide's designers decided to opt for individualized so-called native apps, tuned to take advantage of the features of each operating system. With encryption security at its core and a need to block the ability to take screen shots of the disappearing messages, a universal web app of Confide was almost out of the question. By writing native versions, Confide's programmers could rely on the various security and screen shot-blocking features built in to the two leading operating systems.
The desktop also offers considerably more screen real estate for designers to add features.
That was a boon for the news reading app Flipboard, but designers also had to rethink the most basic ways users interacted with it. Since most desktops don't have touch screens, users couldn't use their fingers to "flip" from one story to the next on the desktop version as they do on a smartphone or tablet. So it was back to the classic scrolling method of past software eras.
"Suddenly we had a much larger canvas to play with so you'll see these big full-screen content experiences," says design lead Didier Hilhorst. "But we're not flipping."
Still, Flipboard was able to simplify its desktop strategy by using a single web-based app. Some say native apps gain a substantial performance edge over web apps, but Hilhorst disagrees. "The web has evolved quite a bit from a technological standpoint," he says. "We've seen a big leap the past few years."
The productivity suite Quip had long offered a web-based desktop version, but as usage climbed to 50% daily from just 20% a year ago, the company decided that making native versions would improve the experience. After all, the mobile versions were native to iOS and Android. And most of the desktop users were at work, where native programs like Microsoft Word and Excel have long dominated, says Quip CEO Bret Taylor.
"At work in particular, it's not about mobile-only but about working extremely well across every device and having your data synced on any device at any moment," Taylor says.
The native versions work just as well even if the user doesn't have a live Internet connection and can take better advantage of the specific features of each software system, like integrating with Apple's Spotlight search on the Mac.
