Celltick, a leader in home screen marketing, launched a new Android application today which hopes to move beyond the lock-screen efforts of others and turn it into a platform.
Competitors such as “Go Locker”, “Magic Locker”, and even Facebook’s “Home” all take a very different approach; offering shortcuts to your apps. Whilst the new app today by Celltick, START, also allows for this – they try to display information at a glance.
Rather than opening various applications; this turns the screen you see first into a place where you can instantly see your most accessed information – most commonly being social network feeds such as Facebook and Twitter.
DeveloperTech spoke to Ramgopal Vidyanand, Vice President of Business Development at Celltick, about the future of the release and of (currently) developing exclusively for the Android platform.
DeveloperTech: What was the inspiration behind START? What is it hoping to achieve, and what are the challenges it is hoping to overcome?
Ramgopal Vidyanand: We’ve actually been trying to address the first screen on the device for a long-time. When you pick up your phone I’d say you are doing that with anticipation; so you’re looking for something, and looking how deeply you can get engaged with it.
On the smartphone, we started around a year and a half ago on trying to figure out what we can actually do to bring value to the user on that first screen. There were two things; first of all it was “how can we make performing a task much faster?” The second is, “how can we actually make that fun and intelligent?”
When you think about it, the device actually got a lot more complicated and difficult to actually interact with over the last few years – because of the number of apps.
Typically, we’re launching apps because that’s what we did on our PC. There’s no reason for you to actually do that if you really, really think about it.
It’s going to get more and more sophisticated. Later on [for example] if we’re seeing you use a lot of strategy games – then we might recommend new games to you; put some shortcuts to things which may help you. If we see you’re using a lot of business news apps; then we might give relevant news feeds back to you.
DeveloperTech: So is what you’re saying is that you’re trying to turn the lock screen into a platform in itself eventually?
Ramgopal Vidyanand: Absolutely. So we’re seeing that it’s no longer your lock screen because we’ve made it interactive enough that it’s your start screen. We expect you to start your interactions there; but we still give you the option to just unlock it and go to your home screen.
We will develop more and more functionality into this first screen; offering plug-ins which means you can have a custom “Starter” for different apps and fundamentally open it up so third parties can actually release [their own.]
DeveloperTech: Is there any functionality in the pipeline which you are prioritising on to get out next?
Ramgopal Vidyanand: There are a couple of things that we’ve also done which some people may not know immediately. One is that we’ve put a lot of effort into ensuring the battery consumption is as low as possible, the second is that we work very well with the native security of the device.
Moving forward, our major goal is to put a lot more “Starters” – especially as we see our users using the app and what they use. Then pretty soon you’ll see us opening up the infrastructure so third parties can customise their own app to give a first screen experience which makes sense.
DeveloperTech: Might be speaking a bit early, but is there any timeframe as to when you’re opening up for third party development?
Ramgopal Vidyanand: The goal is to announce an early sign-up for the developer’s programme at AppsWorld, but I’d say we plan to launch it in the next two to three months.
DeveloperTech: In the Press Release for START it mentions you will be launching “with over 20 partners” – can you speak about any of those?
Ramgopal Vidyanand: We partner with three different categories; the first is mobile operators. We’re launching with a variety of mobile operators around the globe.
The second category we’re working with is large media companies; who have a very unique problem. First of all they need to move their assets into the mobile world; the second is the user is probably downloading a few different applications with less engagement.
We’re launching with Yahoo, ESPN, IG, and we’ll soon be announcing more in the US.
The third category is handset manufacturers. We’re partnering with them to make START the default interface; now when I say this – I mean they can not only have some amount of customisation – but also have direct engagement with their users much further than just the purchase of the device.
DeveloperTech: Do you think iOS should be “opened up” to enable similar functionality to what you’re offering?
Ramgopal Vidyanand: Absolutely. I think it’s almost crucial because it’s really difficult to make all the innovations yourself – for example – we don’t believe we can, and that’s one of the reasons we’re opening up [to third party development].
Now there is the approach of saying “yes, I want to open up” but the problem is iOS won’t open up mainly because they want the control – it’s more about the monetisation.
You’re going to curb the community, the innovativeness, and pretty soon you’re going to start losing users mainly because you might not be at the forefront of everything – because you just can’t be at the forefront of everything.
You can get more information on Celltick’s START here. Ramgopal Vidyanand will also be speaking on the Operator Track at Apps World in London on 22nd – 23rd October 2013.
What do you think about the idea of turning the start screen into a platform?
