3 things missing from mobile video app design

The mobile video experience is broken. This sounds like a controversial or provocative thing to say because the mobile video industry is also exploding. But even though there are countless apps out there that will allow you to shoot, stream, view, share, edit, filter and produce video all through your smartphone, app developers are ignoring a pain point in the market.

While there are a proliferation of mobile video apps out there, none of them are addressing the needs of the majority of mobile video takers, who aren’t looking to live stream to strangers or make a six second piece of video art, but who are taking a lot of everyday video that would be interesting to specific groups of people. It could be anything, from your child’s first steps, your dog doing yoga, recording someone fight in a bar, or a quick video of yourself at a big soccer match — it’s this everyday video which makes up the bulk of mobile video.

But it’s also these videos which tend to go the most un-shared — they aren’t for Facebook or Youtube or Instagram –and smartphone memory space is at a premium so they end up being deleted, or downloaded to an external hard drive and forgotten about.

Everyday video is the blind spot in the mobile video ecosystem, yet it represents the biggest opportunity out there. Below, we look at three key elements which are missing from mobile video apps today.

Video Utility

Think of the last 5 video apps you’ve heard about. I’m willing to bet almost all of them offered a video experience that had more to do with live streaming to strangers or sending a disappearing clip than it did about addressing the random clips of everyday video that almost everyone with a smartphone is taking today.

It’s not that there isn’t market value in solutions like Meerkat, Periscope or Vine – clearly there is significant demand for their services – but video apps today seem to have lost touch with video utility in their quest to create ever more fun and exciting (millennial) experiences. Very few apps are addressing one of the central/basic reasons people are taking video today, and they’re not developing solutions that simplify and optimize the experience of the everyday video taker who wants to simply capture specific personal moments and share them with specific circles of people.

Video Privacy

Video sharing today is frustratingly limited, with only two options available – either public or private. Despite the fact that people record a wide array of experiences across public or private, they have to choose different apps or platforms for these different types of videos. One app for private moments (i.e. family album apps, or storage apps) and a different app for public moments (i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Youtube) etc. Not only is this frustrating for users at the moment of sharing, videos also end up scattered across different platforms and are hard to find later on.

We need to see more apps designed to reflect the fact that our life experiences aren’t either public or private, but exist across an entire spectrum. We can’t continue expecting users to jump from platform to platform every time they want to address a different audience if our goal is to provide an intuitive and enjoyable mobile video experience that reflects real life.

Video Storage

We have the ability to record any moment possible on our smartphones but it comes at a price. Smartphone memory is at a premium, and videos are the worst offenders, meaning that most videos either get deleted or stored externally and then forgotten about. Very few video apps have truly satisfying or effective storage options built in to their design from the start.

Even video sharing apps which do allow users to store videos on their platforms limit the length and reduce the quality. Apps like Vine only allow videos that are a few seconds long, and while Whatsapp may store your media for you, the quality is reduced and again you’re limited by length. Moving forward, as smartphone cameras improve (see the 4K camera on the new iPhone 6S), we will have to come up with ways to give users significant storage capabilities that are built in from the start.