Comparing scopes with the fire tablet
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Hey guys. I was thinking about scopes the last days. I know the most of you are thinking that they are deprecated but Im not 100% sure that this is right.
Maybe you know it, maybe not, the amazon fire tablet with the opensource fire os has also something like scopes. It looks and feels very similiar to the ubuntu phone scopes but on the fire tablets they are working very well as you can see here: https://the-digital-reader.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/fire-new-tablet.jpg
The question is: Why?
I think the reason is: The scopes are a place where you can DISCOVER something, not where you want to reach a specific content. On the fire tablet you just go through books, videos, games, like in a store where you can see interesting things but you dont want to buy something specific. And every time you go to this scopes, you can discover something new. Thats why they work. On the Ubuntu Phone, you have the gallery scopes where only the images are, you already own. They dont change without your action so you dont can discover there something. So the gallery scope is just useless like the most other scopes. You need scopes where you can discover NEW things. Thats why the nearby scope was a good idea I think.
The advantage of this system is: You dont have to check 10 apps for something new. You could say, that you have push notifications for this but if you are following 1000 People on a social media, you dont want to have a notification for each new post.
But maybe you want to take a look on the posts from the last five minutes without opening the app. And you dont want to have a notification for each article of the new york times but you want to read through all the titles sometimes.But you dont need a summary of all pictures you have on the phone. They are nothing new.
What I want to say: We do not necessarily have to do away with scopes. We just need BETTER scopes which offer something new to discover and which makes fun and dont just show a list of content that's on the phone.
So in an ideal world you are on your scopes and see all your apps. You swipe to the next scope where you can see whats new in the new york times, on the next scope you see microblog posts from something like twitter, facebook or mastodon. On the next you see pictures posted from friends on something like instagram or pixelfed. And on the next scope you see new articles from your RSS feeds.
Or another idea: We could write a tool which creates a scope from a rss url.
So in conclusion: The scopes can be very awesome if they focus on "discovering new things which are INTERESTING for the user". They have potential, which we should keep and not kick away. The problem is that facebook would never create an Ubuntu Touch facebook scope and we can not use an API for this but we should see this as potential for the future when in 2-3 years everyone is using Ubuntu Touch (yes, I am VERY optimistic :-P)
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Advertising driven central UI development and data collection - was there in both.
Distraction and deception tries to be interesting - is that better than independent app paths?
