Listening to some podcasts about mobile devices I heard over and over statements like “iPhone changed the world with multi-touch” and “Android could compete with Apple if it had multi-touch.” This simply isn’t true. Okay, while perhaps not a lie, the success and value of of multitouch is extremely overrated. In fact, the iPhone barely uses multi-touch!
Don’t believe me? Think back to the iPhone of 2007 when it launched. Or just look at the Apple provided apps in today’s iPhone (since not much has changed). How many of these built-in apps use multi-touch? I can only count 3: Maps, Photos, and Safari. All three of them use multi-touch in a single simple way: zooming in and out. You could make a non-multitouch iPhone by simply providing a zoom-out button for these three apps (and a quick-tap for zooming in).
Very little of what made the iPhone interface so revolutionary was multi-touch. What made it so great was the focus on using a single finger for virtually all interaction with the device. The designers at Apple decided from day one to make a device that was finger centric. This means UI controls that are large and require only a tap gesture to activate. Swipe gestures are used for navigation. And that’s it. Taps and swipes with a single finger. That’s what made the iPhone so great, not multi-touch (or the accelerometer, for that matter).
Oh, and one more thing made it great. The large screen with a capacitive touch sensor. Older touch enabled devices (like my old beloved Treo) used resistive screens which were far less accurate and required you to either push hard with your finger or use a stylus. A Treo with a capacitive screen could have supported an iPhone like interface with ease (even on the much slower hardware available to it at the time).
While the hard glass iPhone screen does support multiple touch-points at once, that’s not what made it a success. It’s designing an interface and device from the ground up for finger-based touch interaction that changed the mobile device playing field. Multi-touch is simply a red herring.
Finger photo used under Creative Commons from Flickr user bayat
by Mark Muday
27 Nov 2009 at 13:56
Three comments:
1) You make a good point about the UI becoming finger-centric: this is where other mobile OS’s have failed (windows mobile, etc.).
2) You left out the other main factor that made the touch UI a success: responsiveness. To present a touch UI that doesn’t respond instantly an fluidly is to totally frustrate your users (I see this with a lot of the android phones, as well as with the palm pre — they all still feel sluggish, even the Promised One, the Droid). So, finger-centric design plus good sensors plus real-time response plus hardware acceleration (plus top-notch visual design) have made it a success.
3) I think you may be selling multitouch short; or at least your ever-so-slightly incendiary title implies that multitouch has little use (I could be wrong here; you could just be citing its red-herringosity with respect to iphone successes). I think the potential for multitouch to enable “real” direct-manipulation-style UIs has yet to be fully tapped. I think that a good, responsive multitouch implementation will enable more expressive, and more *real-feeling* interactions. A single finger can only do so much; but ten fingers plus software that can deal with real multtouch will be a truly liberating experience (doing several things at once, like panning your work surface while dragging elements independently, allowing a second-hand gesture to modify the actions of the other hand).
By the way, keep up the great work! I want to hear more from you.
by Charles Tam
27 Nov 2009 at 14:13
Agree Josh,
Perhaps, at a later stage, multi-touch usage would be more common in desktop computing.
Currently, I’m working on a JavaFX project which I would like to include such technology, as shown on my web site.
by Tbee
27 Nov 2009 at 21:23
Totally agree josh. Finger touch has always been the way to go (look at SciFi movies; tables with gestures). Multitouch is just a small enhancement, and only for handgeld units. I do not see myself swipe across my laptop’s screen, let alone with two fingers.
by Carl Jokl
28 Nov 2009 at 01:14
I wonder how much off the iPhone success is down to marketing. Apple has been very good at pushing computers and technology as a trendy fashion statement. They embrace snobbery sometimes whereby owning an Apple device makes a statement about being wealthy and successful. They are very good about making people feel like they want to be part of this “exclusive” club. I think a lot of people are buying iPhones because it is the trendy thing to have. They see someone with one and feel they want to have one too.
The HTC HD 2 is being slated as “The iPhone Killer”. In terms of technical specs I think it is superior in every way to the iPhone 3GS. The one thing it lacks is multi touch. I think the reason is that apple has this feature locked down by patents and so for a feature which as you say isn’t that useful HTC and others are happy to do without it.
Will the HD 2 kill the iPhone? I don’t think so. Do you think the masses understand or care about technical specs. It is about the trendy gadget.
What worries me Infinitely more right now is the question of JavaME. For years it has been a common platform for mobile devices. However now all the buzz is about iPhone, Android and Palm Pre. Not one of them is a standards compliant JavaME device. The market share of Nokia which once had the lions share of the mobile space has plummeted. Other traditional vendors seem to be equally struggling. I don’t want the industry to slide back to having to use proprietary APIs and technologies for each mobile platform and JavaME to quietly get swept under the rug.
by Hansi
28 Nov 2009 at 15:55
I think what made multi-touch a huge success (even though it might be “useless” at the moment) is that it makes people think “this is great, just imagine what you can do with this…”. it inspires people to think about ways to approach problems from a different angle, and even though 90% of the time you can do just fine without it, apple made sure that the other 10% are taken care of as well.
it’s the okay-ish icing on top of a pretty good cake.
don’t get me wrong, but if you stick to that comparison for a second javafx would be a pretty terrible cake (no webcam support, the whole weird signed applet issue, still missing gui editor, the alias “the thing that makes my browser crash?”, etc.) with an amazing icing (applets can run outside browser, afaik first commercially-targeted functional language, etc.).
it’s up to us developers to decide what kinda cake we bake, i guess…
by Fabrizio Giudici
29 Nov 2009 at 03:33
Not having an iPhone I can’t say anything – but the fact that “red herring” and “Apple” match very well ;-)
Seriously, I think that multi-touch is a real advantage for some specific domains. For instance, looking at the Microsoft Surface, I like a lot the way you can arrange photos (and media) as you were used to do with a traditional light table. This probably has nothing to do with the iPhone or mobile devices, since they have small screens. The plus here is to have a large space available.
by Peter Korn
13 Feb 2010 at 00:13
You’ve actually missed an important iPhone app – and one that makes very significant use of multi-touch. VoiceOver. Try it sometime on a 3Gs. Two fingers twisting to change the speed of the voice. Multiple fingers swiping, etc. Interesting and innovative uses to do system-wide things for someone who can’t see and has no buttons to press.