We all live in a Yellow Apptopia

Posted by Luis Soeiro In: Business, Technology

In the town where I was born…Lived a man who sailed to sea…And he told us of his life…In the land of subm……..

SNOOZE!!! Ten more minutes. SNOOZE!!!

Eventually, you’ll have to get up. It’s 7:30 and your personal assistant app is telling you that you need to leave now, if you still want that Russian customer to keep treating you as a partner.

According to the Weather app, it’s a cold Autumn morning, but no rain, praise Thor. And here comes your second push notification. It’s from your calendar. Good news: today you’ll have 10 minutes off during lunch time. You can treat yourself nicely, use any delivery app and swallow that delicious burger that travelled for 45 minutes on the back of a smokey motorcycle.

Shower? Check. Coffee? Check. Eggs? Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Third notification (and strike) tells you that almond milk is at a special price, but who on Earth installed that app from the local grocery store? It must have been hidden on your phone for ages. Delete app.

Finally, you leave home, and according to your preferred GPS Navigation app, the regular route would add 20 minutes of traffic. But fear not! There’s an alternative that will avoid the city jam. Your Russian customer will be so happy. In his own way, of course.

As soon as you enter the office building, you feel a strange buzzer inside your pocket. Oopsie Daisy! it’s the reminder app, reminding you that you asked to be reminded as soon as you entered the office building, to tell the doorman that your key card is faulty. Long Live reminder apps that remind!

The meeting with the Russian customer went…well…smooth. At least no one got hurt, apart from your business dignity. Time to check your 23 Social Network updates. Facebook is telling me that it’s Pradeep’s birthday, and I should give him a shoutout. Ok, who’s Pradeep and why is he my friend?

Time to relax. The 10-minute lunch time is on, baby. That delivery burger? Forget it. Sushi it is. So much more Social Friendly. And that raw salmon color goes so well with the office background curtains. “Your order is on the way” says a new notification from the delivery app. “Would you like to rate 24/7 deliveries?”.

Sushi wasn’t really good, but the photo you took is so instagrammable and will be getting a lot of hearts. There’s nothing like a good filter.

Lunch is taken care of, and now your fitness app tells you that you still have 8000 steps to reach the daily goal. What were you thinking? 12000 daily steps? Daily goals? Maybe you need to get a grip on your life.

Coffee, emails, more coffee, more emails, Zoom meeting……Zoom meeting…Virus…Pandemic…was that Russian in the morning wearing a mask? Oh Sh*&!!! Your next 7 days will be stressful. Better to bring up your shopping app and order 2 million masks.

It’s safe to say that many of us can relate to this stressful diary. We surround ourselves with applications that trigger notifications that literally show us the path to follow on our day and influence our choices. Sometimes we feel overwhelmed and cluttered by the number of times small bits of content and info get in the way of our daily routine, but when some of those apps become a real commodity and provide relevant input, we as users tend to tighten the relationship and become loyal, allowing that commodity to become part of our day.

Either it being a fitness app, a news report, a simple task manager or even a navigation app that helps on the daily commuting, the real reason to become a loyal user and open our life “doors” is when we find a definitive purpose for that piece of software. And when that happens, it means that that small group of devs working together and surviving with loads of coffee, granola and Organic Yoghourt are doing something right and deserve to be praised.

The App World is like an overly crowded submarine, where apps try to live and be noticeable, and sometimes we let ourselves go with the flow and install everything, but the really good ones, the ones that will partner with us and provide real service, those will prevail.

As a small team of dedicated people that work very hard to be relevant to our users, that loyalty is the greatest achievement we can get. Although we still need to buy the coffee grains and the expensive granola – so if you purchase some in-apps it would be great – appreciation to our work helps us to perform even better in the future. And that appreciation can simply be demonstrated by using the tech that we developed, as your daily companion.