360iDev: What is the Soul of an App?

The theme behind the 1982 Movie Tron was that programs reflect the programmer who wrote them, a bit of their user's soul makes then what they are. I thought about that Monday while attending sessions at 360iDev in Denver. While I could have gone to technical sessions, I went to the softer sessions. At the afternoon keynote, speaker Mike Lee brought Tron back in my memory with a presentation Growth the Destroyer. Towards the end of his presentation he challenged the audience if growth as the overall achievement of success would not only take our reputation, but our souls.

That ending for Monday, the first day of 360iDev was summed up for the first day of sessions and what soul we put and lose in developing apps. This is an unconventional convention as I've written before. I'm listening to Moving Right Along by the Muppets as the music before the 2nd day keynote session. Lighthearted as that is, there a seriousness to the themes I saw here. I can sum it up with that question: What is the soul of an app?

The sessions I attended Monday, both technical and nontechnical has that as themes. For me the theme started with Michael Sacks' With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. He started with an impossible challenge for this audience: shut off all devices for a whole day. His talk continued on two lines: how B.F. Skinner's Behaviorism and the optimization of it has lead to an addicted connected culture. That is primarily to the benefit of the large organizations collecting data and advertising to us on platforms. These organizations are using that data to addict us more and to sell product, yet they are not releasing data that could be used by others in research to make other, better outcomes for people, such as achieving a balance between online and offline time. Then came the incredible talk by Neem Serra Being a Cupcake in A Doughnut World. That talk discussed unconscious bias, starting with a simple case of bringing donuts to a morning business meeting where some might like cupcakes, though many people assume everybody likes doughnuts. The talk challenged assumptions, and showed how some systems might promote unconscious bias. Unconscious bias and poor testing of apps without a large and diverse enough test group can end up with a poor user experience for the app. Serra gave one personal anecdote about user experience: a kiosk she helped design using the camera in an permanently mounted iPad was installed too high for her to appear on camera when using the app. Following that I gave my talk, so I saw no other sessions in the morning, but after lunch I went to the session From IOS To IOT: The Experiences Of A Software Guy Building Hardware. Ben Lachman converted both his developer hat and his passion for conserving energy to making a new hardware product to monitor electrical use in the home. After a presentation on the current situation in high schools teaching coding by Jessi Chartier, was the afternoon keynote speaker, Mike Lee and his thesis our obsession with growth is actually destroying everything.

Many of these sessions, except Mike Lee's keynote, were poorly attended. As many probably ask, why are these important to app developers? Should't it be all technical sessions? There's a few answers to that question, and I like Neem Serra's answer as a good starting point. First impressions count, and they are a double edged sword. You might prejudge a person by their appearance, gender, or skin color, and treat them permanently different. But you also judge an app on first impression the same way. If your first experience with an app is a bad one, or offensive to you, you won't use or buy the app. As someone who is color blind, apps that rely completely on color never grace my phone. Apps that require a lot of dexterity due to some neurological disabilities mean I don't do arcade games, nor will you find many on my phone. If I am frustrated the first time I use an app, I'll probably delete it. I suspect most people do. Thinking out the details that don't exclude audience means more people will buy an app.

Yet the bigger issue is the soul of an app. Tron is right. We as developers import our soul, our attitudes, biases and admittedly our ignorance to an app. When developers fail to focus on the welfare of the user, it's not good for anyone. This can fail at a very early stage, as Jessi Chartier stressed in her talk about high schools. Perception of what programming is must come from experiencing programming, not by teaching abstraction about programming. It's like teaching Mozart without listening to music. One might not love programming or one might not, but either way what programming is and is not becomes clear. Once one knows what programming is, one can write apps to one own voice and personality. There are many voices that get silenced, she argues because the system is biased towards only one kind of learning, and at that age one type of student tend to fit in that category of learner. If you get the basics done, you find those students that would have been excluded due to more traditional learning have incredible ideas from their experience.

If they get past the coding and programming, there comes new dilemmas. We can work for others, such as Facebook or Twitter, making things that do not reflect us. Those thing as Michael Sacks brought many of these big producers use optimized random-reward systems to keep us addicted to our devices. Developers could be a startup, but I'm with Mike Lee here in his definition of a startup: A pig waiting to be slaughtered. A startup is somewhere that is fattened up with a lot of money to be bought out by a bigger company for more money. Is there anything that change the world for the better there? Is the more money destructive to an intrinsic culture, as Mike Lee described as the internal battles at Apple between the Mac teams and the Phone teams, or as Mike did not remark on, from the same replacement and marginalizing of the Apple II teams by the Mac teams? Both are growth, but in either case was Apple better for it? As we build apps, are we building thing to make both users personal space and the world at large better like Ben Lachman?

I've been trying to come up with answers that fit easily into a column, like a simple happy ending to a Disney movie like Tron. Yet I can't. Maybe that's the point. These sessions were not about answers like their technical cousins here at 360iDev, but to leave us with the questions we will need to answer for ourselves when we plan and code apps in our daily lives. It is not to just have an answer, but to keep asking the questions.

Steven Lipton is the mind behind makeapppie.com for learning iOS app development. He is the author of several books on iOS programming and development. He is also a LinkedIn Learning and Lynda.com author. His latest courses are Advanced iOS ApplicationDevelopment:Core Motion and Learning Swift Playgrounds Application Development