Double Tap in The Third Dimension: One More Thing Shared Across Platforms

October 26, 2023

Double Tap in The Third Dimension: One More Thing Shared Across Platforms

Many Apple critics argue that Apple locks users into their closed ecosystem via things such as special cables (actually a thing of the past now) or relatively closed systems such as iCloud or Apple Music. While this is certainly an important part of Apple's strategy I believe that the "positive lock-in" that they achieve via (relative) consistent good usability and interoperability across their platforms weighs much more.

Just think about the new three dimensional double tap on Apple Watch that just launched yesterday with watchOS 10.1. In a way it is a logical evolution of the two dimensional double tap that we use on iPhone and iPad which in turn is a natural extension of double-click on the Mac (or prior, the Apple Lisa).

"A double-click is the act of pressing a computer mouse button twice quickly without moving the mouse. Double-clicking allows two different actions to be associated with the same mouse button. It was developed by Bill Atkinson of Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) for their Lisa project." ["Double-click" article on Wikipedia]

How you double-tap on your watch according to Apple: "Users can tap the index finger and thumb of their watch hand together twice to quickly perform many of the most common actions." Note that this is exactly the same way how double-tap works (in terms of how you perform the gesture) on Apple's new Vision Pro headset which will launch early next year in the US.

I personally remember a few cases where I wanted to stop a timer or get rid of an incoming message or call on Apple Watch while cooking or training and I had only one hand free. I think that the new double tap will come in very handy for such use cases.

"The one thing you have to get used to is that the watch only listens for the double tap gesture when the display is fully-on. You need to tilt your wrist to look at your watch before double tapping." [John Gruber on Daring Fireball]

I think that this consistent behavior across platforms is what many Apple users really like and what draws them to the Apple ecosystem (or the other way round, let's them stick around). It is also what Apple nearly messed up a couple of years ago, but recently again improved on a lot (especially with making the Mac more and more iOS-like where it makes sense).

The other major magnet that draws people to Apple's ecosystem is (in my opinion) the interoperability between the individual devices -- just think about a few things Apple introduced over the years that might be only small things, but that are really practical:

If you join a Wi-Fi network on one device your other devices will also instantly know about the network. Very convenient when checking into a hotel for the first time -- try this using a PC and your Android phone...
If you play music from your iPhone you can raise your Apple Watch to skip to the next song or adjust the volume
You can use AirDrop to quickly share files peer-to-peer between any Apple device (I use this all the same when testing new Mac binaries or for sharing full-resolution photos). The new NameDrop that Apple also launched yesterday is another useful application of the same base technology
And one of my favorites: copy & paste across devices. Super useful for copying transaction codes or other small things
And of course iCloud: I use Dropbox less and less as the Files app on iPhone and iPad gets better with each release and syncing photos really works now very well and totally transparent
Finally, there is also Handoff for continuing tasks on another device, but to be honest: I (personally) rarely use it; if I start writing on the iPad and want to polish the text later on the Mac I simply save the file in iCloud

Naturally, many of these things only work if you are signed into all your devices with the same iCloud user. In other words, you have to use iCloud in order to benefit from most newer interoperability features. I know that some very privacy focused people have a problem with this. On the other hand I strongly believe that Apple is here really the best choice in terms of privacy when you think of big tech. I think even most Apple haters will agree that neither Microsoft, nor Google are generally seen as more trustworthy than Apple.

On an interesting side note, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admitted in a recent interview at Business Insider that it was a mistake to abandon Windows Phone, or that the whole episode could have been handled in a better way. If you look at the quote below it is pretty clear that Nadella is referring to an ecosystem that Microsoft had given up. And due to the success of Azure Cloud and Xbox Game Pass, Mr. Nadella knows how valuable good ecosystems are.

"In retrospect, I think there could have been ways we could have made it work by perhaps reinventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones." [Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on abandoning Windows Phone at Business Insider]

Of course this sometimes comes with a higher price as also the recent price increases across Apple's services show. However, also here you see their strategy at work: naturally the "Apple One" service bundle price increase was much more modest as for the individual services. We will see if the second price increase for Apple TV+ was not "too much" -- after all, the service is now basically double as expensive as two years ago.

Anyway, for me the launch of double tap comes at the exactly right time: as the battery of my Apple Watch Series 4 is now slowly getting worse (which is totally OK as I charge it every night -- if you consider the number of charging cycles for a lithium ion battery) I am thinking about getting a new one before Xmas. Therefore, I hope for a nice discount on the new Series 9 during the usual Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales that we will surely see in time for Thanksgiving (this year on the 23rd of November, as not everyone here in Europe will know :-).