The disaggregated smartphone

Part 1 – The Smartphone

Smartphones are on almost everyone’s list of the greatest inventions of all times. In fact I often think that the most influential innovations were 1) the discovery of fire, 2) the invention of the wheel, and 3) the design of the smartphone.

I am sure that at first glance most people would consider such a view overly simplistic. What about, for example, writing, electricity, radio, computers, the Internet, GPS navigation? Although all of these were considered major achievements in their times, they can now be seen to be either merely precursors (i.e., steps in the right direction) of the smartphone, or at most its technological enablers.

After all, the astounding usefulness of the smartphone derives from the fact that it fulfills so many different needs. I personally use my smartphone as a:

• telephone
• radio / news source (replacing newspapers)
• Internet browser (for entertainment and work purposes)
• computer (application platform and general purpose computational power)
• map / GPS navigation
• camera (both stills and video)
• calculator
• clock (making my wrist watch mostly superfluous)
• flashlight (I threw out all my old ones)
• pedometer (ditto – I never replaced the battery in my standalone one)
• bubble level 

and there are over 2,000,000 additional apps in each of the leading app stores!

Before the advent of the smartphone each of these applications was packaged separately, which obliged the user to separately purchase each product or service, carry the product around or tediously access each service, and of course learn each individual human-to-machine interface.

The magic of the smartphone is not only that it is the most successful aggregator ever deployed, rather that it has become the great equalizer - a single platform with a unified intuitive user interface. Take away any one of its applications and the smartphone remains almost as smart (and someone will replace the missing application within a day).

But if we take them all away what’s left? Is the smartphone just an empty shell, and not such a great invention after all?

Part 2 – Disaggregation

The term disaggregation has recently become pervasive in telecomm. The word is relatively unknown to the public at large, although its first documented use was in 1811. The dictionary definition is breaking up of a total (aggregate) into smaller elements, usually for easier handling or management.

Some people in the telecomm industry bizarrely use it nowadays to connote the clean separation of hardware and software functionalities, but since combining software and hardware is called integration (and not aggregation), the correct word to capture that separation would be disintegration!

So what do we mean by disaggregation? It is a methodology for building complex systems in general, and complex communications devices in particular. To appreciate the idea we need first to explore aggregation.

Aggregation is usually defined as collecting many distinct parts or individuals into a whole, but in technological settings is often used to more specifically mean collecting of multiple related functions into a single system. An early example is the combined pencil and eraser, which was awarded US patent 19,783 in 1858. This patent was later overturned by the US Supreme Court based on the fact that no joint function was performed by the pencil and the eraser. This sometimes happens with aggregation; while the aggregated functions need to be related (a combined pencil and fork wouldn’t qualify), the aggregate need merely be a collection, not necessarily a coherent integration.

[But not in this case. No joint function performed by a pencil and an eraser? Really? That’s like saying that the backspace key on our keyboards is not really a key because it makes the cursor move backwards! Only judges who for decades have had all their writing performed by law clerks could have come to such a conclusion! I can imagine a judge studying the invention and upon noticing that the pencil and eraser were at opposite ends realizing that they couldn’t be used simultaneously.]

A somewhat more modern embodiment of aggregation is a combined copier-printer-scanner-fax machine. Such a machine aggregates four different devices, all useful in a small-office setting, thus saving both cost and desk space. Here there is a bit more integration (i.e., function re-use), since the fax uses the scanner when transmitting and uses the printer when receiving, and the copier uses the scanner and the printer at the same time.

So aggregation means combining multiple related, but disparate, functions to form one system.

Disaggregation is the opposite –taking a single (even if quite complex) system and dividing it up into a set of internal functions.

When building aggregated systems there is strong pressure towards functionality integration - if I am already fielding a box then it might as well do everything I need! With disaggregated system it is the other way around, disaggregation encourages breaking functions down into ever more granular (atomic) components, called microservices.

Disaggregating the combined copier-printer-scanner-fax-machine means realizing that it comprises three distinct microservices:

1)      printing

2)      scanning

3)      fax-modem

The copier application utilizes the scanning and printing microservices.

The printer and scanner applications utilize only a single microservice each.

The fax send application utilizes the scanner and fax-modem microservices.

The fax receive application utilizes the fax-modem and printing microservices.

Note that the microservices are not simply the devices that we would have aggregated to make copier-printer-scanner-fax-machine, they are smaller than that (hence microservices).

Just as in this case a disaggregated system may engender multiple applications, but in such cases system unity relies on look and feel. We think of a smartphone as a single device, not as a phone, a browser, a music player and a flashlight held together with rubber bands. That’s what we meant when we called it the great equalizer!

In software settings disaggregation requires one more feature – the use of well defined (preferably open) interfaces to enable re-using the microservices to form new functions. Without open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) the most useful functions don’t realize their usefulness potential. Sure, simple re-use may save development time and allows us to swap functions for better alternatives when these appear, but only with open interfaces can functions be re-used in ways not originally envisaged. Disaggregation encourages innovation!

Putting this all together, we can define disaggregation as building systems based on microservices with well defined interfaces.

Part 3 –Aggregation or disaggregation?

Modern smartphones aggregate multiple applications, but are designed using disaggregation.

Smartphone hardware (such as the clock, camera, microphone, MEMS accelerometer, etc.) and software (the drivers, services, apps) components are presented as granular, independent functions with open interfaces. That is, they are all microservices.

As an example, smartphones incorporate a MEMS accelerometer in order to detect phone orientation and rotate the display accordingly. Were this simply a closed internal component that would have been that; but the MEM accelerometer has an open interface making it accessible to other apps. So it is accessed by a pedometer app to count your steps. It is accessed by a bubble level to find the down direction. It is accessed by gaming apps requiring hand-motions (such as playing tennis). Were it not for disaggregation such access would not have been possible and no-one would ever have envisioned using the smartphone as a pedometer, bubble meter, and gaming device.

Similarly the camera is a hardware microservice and not limited to taking pictures. It is used by video conferencing apps like Skype, by page scanning apps to capture printed pages, by astronomy apps to detect constellations, and even by picture hanging apps to help level frames.

While aggregation of different applications made the smartphone popular, it was disaggregation that made it great.

Part 4 – The Bottom Line

We can now answer the question we previously left open – is the smartphone only an aggregator of the useful applications, and thus not a great invention after all?

The smartphone is not one of greatest inventions of all times.

But maybe disaggregation is ...