Smartphones Never Became the Creative Tools We Once Imagined

In the 200xs, we faced the wave of the “smartphone” and were filled with joy.

“Finally, the device we’d been waiting for was born!”

Demand for a mobile form factor combining computing power and usability had always been anticipated in the past.

In fact, that was always where feature phones were headed too, and you can trace the same lineage back as far as Palm.

Windows CE was obviously aimed at that same target, and many manufacturers released cool products running Windows CE.

But none of them managed to fully dominate the market, and eventually everyone came to see mobile computing devices as

“a fleeting category of products that only a few gadget enthusiasts buy and then quickly tire of.”

It was practically resignation.

Amid that, a product appeared with enough undeniable presence that everyone became convinced: “Ah, this was the final form we’d been looking for!”

That was the shock of the iPhone.

Today, it’s rare to see an era where “everyone around the world carries roughly the same thing” to this degree.

Now even manufacturers other than Apple keep making products nearly identical to the iPhone, staying just barely on the right side of patent infringement.

Smartphones have become like jeans at this point.

At a glance, there’s nothing distinctive about any of them. Except for a segment of enthusiasts, users don’t really ask for that either.

That’s because content matters, and the device itself doesn’t.

Give it another ten years and most young people probably won’t even know it all started with the iPhone. In developing countries where Apple products are scarce and cheap Chinese smartphones already dominate the market, that may already be the case.

In the end, roots and the philosophy behind them don’t matter.

Through this process of dramatic generalization, what’s demanded of smartphones has changed considerably.

I think what was originally demanded of mobile devices was a small terminal for creative work.

That is, a device that would let you do things like edit documents, write code, or do part of your app development even while out and about. (This was especially true back when using the internet on the go wasn’t cheap.)

But that idea lacked economic rationality after all.

Mobile devices carry all kinds of technical difficulties. Just fitting a battery and a display into such a small device is already a struggle. On top of that, small devices are also at a severe disadvantage when it comes to securing electromagnetic compatibility.

In other words, it costs money.

Building a device just to meet “creative” needs of that scale simply doesn’t pay off.

So the iPhone steered toward becoming a more general-purpose information terminal instead.

It overwhelmingly expanded its user base, came to dominate the market, and evolved into a business model that wrings out every last drop of value as a platform.

That said, of course in the early days a fair amount of extensibility was guaranteed through external accessories. But now, how many people even use an external keyboard anymore?

And today it’s fair to say that a smartphone’s one truly essential function is as a “receiver and display for information.”

Here’s something that strikes me.

Does a mere information terminal really need this much processing power?

If anything, development of smartphone SoCs keeps accelerating — why is that?

Processing high-resolution photos, real-time image recognition, watching large video files, and so on. There’s no shortage of reasons.

In short, it’s a response to the diversification of content and the diversification of what smartphones themselves are used for.

As for the diversification of smartphone use cases, more precisely it’s an absorption of use cases — a phenomenon where activities that used to be done on dedicated devices are gradually being replaced by the “convenient device” in your hand, now equipped with abundant processing power. If you think about it calmly, the causality here — which came first — is actually unclear.

As for content, it seems to me we’ve arrived at what is essentially the classic gap between what users want and what specs manufacturers assume they want.

For example, is the motivation to watch 1080p-or-higher video on a mere 5-inch display really something essential?

In an era where most content is consumed on a smartphone or, at most, a tablet, where’s the necessity of shooting content in 8K?

The VR narrative is making what must be its umpteenth appearance in history, but what did we actually learn from the great failure of 3D TVs?

“Providing more than what users ask for” is an idealized fiction that manufacturers always hold up as an ideal.

I deliberately call it a “fiction” because in most cases that behavior doesn’t touch on any “latent user desire” at all — it’s simply pushing a set of values on people that nobody asked for.

So why can this kind of forced sale keep going? By economic logic it shouldn’t make sense.

But nothing about it is actually wrong. Simply put, it’s profitable. Not from the visible part of the forced sale, but from what’s happening behind it.

As someone involved in developing electronics, if I were handed the brief “develop a smartphone from scratch equivalent to a flagship iPhone or Android device,” I would say it’s extremely difficult to bring it to market at $910.

That holds whether you’re talking about recouping development costs or scrutinizing the unit price of individual components — the conclusion probably wouldn’t change either way.

And yet many smartphones are sold not just near $910 but for far less.

Why? Because of data.

It hardly needs saying at this point, but many devices and apps collect usage data.

The brazenness of listing ads in recent years is honestly frightening.

I use the word “brazenness” here because targeted advertising that’s this blatant leaves you with a bleak, pitying feeling, not unlike an encounter with a clumsy con artist.

The improved accuracy of facial recognition is the fruit of us continually feeding facial data into countless apps and platforms so we could compile photo albums of our partners and children. This, in itself, is fine — users provide effort with a certain degree of consent for a shared benefit, and in exchange manufacturers provide value in the form of services. Not bad at all.

Having a music service analyze your taste from the playlists you’ve built and recommend artists is, in a sense, welcome too. That’s because that’s precisely the purpose for which you’re using a music service in the first place.

But the TV shows I watch, the cafes I visit, my religion, my social connections, my sexual preferences, how many hours a day I spend on which game — that information isn’t something we can reasonably say we handed over to manufacturers “expecting some kind of service improvement.”

And yet that kind of information gets used constantly and broadly.

From the manufacturer’s perspective, the logic probably goes like this:

“We’re pouring enormous development costs into building the platform for smartphones and their associated services. The fact that part of that is recouped by improving our services through data collection — by offering advertisers more sophisticated ad capabilities — is, if anything, a legitimate return on our investment.”

And to put it more bluntly: “If you don’t like it, don’t use it.”

I myself had, for a while now, grown tired of how many ads were showing up on Facebook, and I barely use it anymore.

That’s my own way of saying NO to overly blatant advertising.

I’ve set it up so only mentions show up properly, and that’s all I look at. In other words, I only look at what I actually want to see.

Google has offered an Incognito mode for a long time now. Using it keeps your search history and cookies from being saved in the browser.

It suggests Google has taken some kind of stance on privacy.

Unfortunately, though, this apparently has nothing to do with whether “the website you visited is siphoning off your data or not.”

It would be fairer, really, for Google to promote a system like DuckDuckGo’s, which is premised on blocking access to behavioral data in the first place.

Ugh, it’s exhausting.

And yet, deciding to stop using a smartphone altogether has finally become genuinely difficult.

We already depend on our smartphones for most of our means of contact.

LINE, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Slack, Teams — the list goes on endlessly.

But let’s think about it.

Almost everything you can do on LINE, you could already do on SMS.

And yet we use LINE anyway. This is the scary part of platform business — it skillfully exploits human psychology.

Against this, the counterargument that “the performance of messaging apps is on a completely different level from SMS” would be fair enough.

Response speed, read receipts, sticker features, and so on.

But this is already stepping into the “gap” I mentioned earlier.

Whether a reply to my mother back home on LINE takes 1 second or 10 seconds hardly matters. She’s not going to reply right away regardless of whether she’s read it.

Stickers were fun as a novelty, but by now most people are already tired of them and just recycle the same handful every time.

Read receipts, if anything, are more often a source of trouble, so everyone would probably be happier not knowing.

I’m sure there are counterarguments to all of this too. But the fact that there’s even room for debate on these points at all shows, without a doubt, just how far we’ve encroached into this unstable gap territory.

Before Facebook existed, people shared updates with friends over mailing lists and the like.

That old way of doing things was undeniably less interactive (no “likes,” for instance), and it assumed communication only within a group of mutually authorized members. If you wanted to communicate indiscriminately with a large, unspecified audience, the only tools that existed were things like bulletin boards — which, conversely, were far too public.

That was a very lopsided situation, and Facebook deserves credit for filling that gap.

But did we really need such a lightweight communication tool?

When you write an email, for instance, you reread the text several times. Once sent, it can’t be corrected.

On social media, we don’t do that. In most cases, you can edit or delete a post even after it’s up.

Say something casually, and if it goes wrong, delete it right away.

That’s not behavior that’s easily accepted in society. That’s why plenty of companies have a “no deleting” rule on their internal social platforms.

The improvisational, unruly energy of a bulletin board, and the static stability of email.

Nobody thinks the era when we communicated by drawing on those two opposite poles was perfect.

But today, aside from bulletin boards in their heyday, there’s really no effective means of communication left besides the SNS platform, which carries that same quiet unruliness. It’s now extremely rare to properly organize your thoughts, bring the content up to a decent quality, and then send something to a friend.

I once tried debating environmental issues with a bureaucrat friend of mine over email, and each round trip typically took two or three days, sometimes up to a week.

That’s because it required thinking carefully, researching properly to avoid mistakes, and only then sending back a proposal or a counterargument.

That strikes me as an extremely orderly and productive style of communication.

The reason discussions of political or social issues on social media seem to produce nothing but cloud-hosted garbage comes down to exactly this.

I’ve ended up handling several issues in parallel here (that’s how large and complicated the industrial-structure damage caused by smartphones and social media over the past decade-plus has been), but essentially what I want to raise is this:

• The diversity of communication has been discarded, and everything has been optimized around the smartphone
• Social media collects vast amounts of data that has drifted away from what users actually need
• Smartphones have willingly fallen into being puppets of social media

My inference is that these are, as a result, the triggers behind much of the instability and imbalance we see today.

Picture a couple where one says “I wanted to hear your voice, so I called” — it’s a scene that warms the heart.

It even feels true to human nature.

Compare that to being irritated that someone “read but didn’t reply” on LINE, or noticing that one particular person didn’t like the photo you posted on Instagram.

Things like that seem like nothing more than folly — people inflicting stress on themselves because of a system they built themselves.

That said, wistfully saying “things were better in the old days” solves nothing.

If you’re dissatisfied with the current state of things, the right stance is to work out a solution.

So let’s think about it.

Take, for instance, the idea of “imposing a tariff on the export of information.”

A few years ago Europe launched the GDPR, and it’s fair to call that a pioneering move.

Concretely, it effectively restricted taking personal data outside of Europe.

For most manufacturers, this just meant being careful about where they located the servers holding customer data — but for companies sitting at the center of the data industry, this was a major, existential issue.

And yet it’s entirely understandable, self-evidently so, that no one can look favorably on a situation where the data generated by their own country’s citizens directly benefits a foreign company. For now it remains regulation, but it will be worth watching how this develops going forward.

Take another example: before the Edo period, apparently, the fatty toro cut of tuna used to be thrown away.

Back when transportation methods weren’t well developed, it was common to preserve tuna in soy-based marinade, and marinating the fatty toro apparently produced a poor, unappetizing result.

If value isn’t recognized, something is essentially free. But once value is recognized, a price gets attached and trading begins.

And if that good is then moved across national borders, it stands to reason that a tariff would come under consideration.

Now, let’s imagine a society where the value of information has declined, or where the cost of collecting information has become relatively expensive.

Ad quality would drop, or costs would rise dramatically, and that would ripple out into all kinds of real-world transactions that have nothing directly to do with advertising.

A smartphone would become a $900-plus item, no longer something you casually buy for each of your kids.

Targeted advertising performance would decline, worsening the revenue structure. That would make it harder to offer apps for free. Developers would shift their focus toward monetizing through in-app purchases, and things would probably settle into something similar to the earlier era when the “freemium → subscription model” first rose to prominence.

Meanwhile, the runaway overinvestment by manufacturers in smartphone development would be reined in, and prices would gradually be pushed down. During the period before that cycle plays out, Chinese smartphones might come to dominate the market.

Large, monopolistic social media platforms would decline, and several new platforms would rise up instead, each enabling communication among a limited membership suited to their particular style of preference. And many of these would be membership-based and paid. The new winners would be the companies providing the secure platforms that let people freely build these kinds of communication tools.

In terms of market size, that would look like contraction. In economic terms, it might look like regression.

But who ever decided that market expansion and economic progress were inherently wonderful in the first place?

If we’re headed in the wrong direction, it’s better to accept contraction or regression and stop for once.

That’s no different from halting a factory’s operations after an environmental problem comes to light, or pausing a construction project to revisit safety standards.

Right now, it looks to me like the market is in a state where it “ought to stop, for once,” caught up in this intense chain of generalization and information exploitation.

We’re producing mountains of e-waste in exchange for mountains of information.

As someone involved in making things, I can’t help but feel a strong revulsion toward a situation like that.

This isn’t necessarily resignation.

Nor does it necessarily demand some immediate, groundbreaking discovery or technological innovation.

For instance, a business model that delivers great satisfaction to a small number of users has become so rare it might as well have been abandoned altogether.

But if we’re allowed to grasp the essence of it with a simple equation — “number of users × satisfaction = value” — there’s still plenty of room to reclaim that set of values.

An ad for a dance school that I searched for on my wife’s tablet, thinking about enrolling our daughter, shows up on my Facebook.

Watching TV at home, we mention an artist and say something like, “Oh, so this artist is getting married” — and that artist’s music video shows up in my YouTube recommendations. (This time I hadn’t even searched for it. But we did say the name repeatedly, and the song had been playing in the room.)

Faced with this kind of unease, I’ve started giving up on various things.

A device that’s convenient and unsettling at the same time.

I don’t want to believe that this is the final form “we” were looking for.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2021/05/344/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.