April 14th, 2012
Multi-Device Seamless Syncing
The proliferation of different devices that have entered our lives over the past 5 years has created one of the greatest product challenges of our time: cross-device compatibility. This is both a design challenge as well as a technology challenge, and an extremely new and difficult problem to solve. Products that even attempt multiple interfaces are very much ahead of the curve, and I wanted to highlight 4 apps I use pretty often that do syncing extremely well.
1. SPARROW.
I mostly use Sparrow for email – have been using the iPhone app since it came out, and use the Mac Desktop client as my primary email application. Use the default “Mail” on the iPad and Gmail’s web app every now and then. This presents a fairly potent challenge for Sparrow because they are a 3rd party application and not hosting the original emails.
That said, despite these core challenges Sparrow does a great job of syncing. There have been hiccups related to the address book syncing and message syncing back to Gmail, though those have been slowly fixed in recent updates.
2. RDIO.
I love Rdio and listen to it often on my laptop, which is great. I pay $9.99 a month for it, making it the most expensive of the 4 apps listed here. I get it that like $9.98 of that goes to the record companies, but still, it’s pricey. I also use Rdio quite a bit on the subway, where more often than not I have no service.
This is where I run into syncing issues, possibly the most severe and annoying of the 4 apps listed here. Their mobile sync is extremely slow and arduous. Perhaps it’s because music files are quite a bit larger than email/text/tweets, but my playlists will often disappear when I am offline and even when I am on wifi the sync is time-consuming.
3. TWITTER.
Twitter is at the forefront of multi-device syncing and I would even argue that this proliferation of smart-devices has contributed greatly to their success. That said, there are some legacy issues with 3rd party developer applications and direct message syncing. I use Tweetbot because it is awesome, but the DMs don’t sync correctly. I don’t know if this is an issue in the Twitter for iPhone official app, but I am pointing it out anyway because, given their original strategy re: 3rd party apps, I think these apps are still important to their ecosystem and user base regardless of where they fall in the grand scheme of the future of the company. Otherwise, seamless multi-device compatibility is a hallmark of their product.
4. INSTAPAPER.
The only reason Instapaper isn’t absolute perfection is because of the Kindle. I attempted to sync my Instapaper to my Kindle and it just didn’t really work quite correctly and is not great at syncing back the articles that you have read already. I believe this to be entirely Amazon’s fault, as the Kindle platform is notoriously difficult to work with, especially if you’re not a traditional publisher.
And that’s another challenge here – do you provide the option to read on the Kindle if you can’t really control the experience? I think it’s important to be device agnostic though I also believe the market will reward platforms that offer the ability to really customize and perfect the experience.
Otherwise, Instapaper’s syncing is SEAMLESS. I read something on my iPhone, archive it, and it is gone from the web and from my iPad. I put it in a folder, same thing. It’s fast to update and sync and in general one of my most favorite cross-device services.
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From a product design perspective, each device presents a new set of challenges and operates using different gestures, speeds and resolutions. Diversity at every level creates an interesting information packaging opportunity, and makes cross-device design one of the most important challenges in consumer tech right now.