Deep Sound Original · The author | Li Tingting
At the OPPO press conference at 4 p.m. today, the corners of OPPO's senior vice president and chief product officer Liu Zuohu almost did not put down, and he excitedly introduced his "coolest", "most exciting" and "another milestone product" since his return to OPPO: OPPO folding screen new machine Find N.
At the press conference, many folding screen experiences that have never been seen before were displayed: QQ users chatted while looking at the list in split-screen mode, stock speculators used the big screen to see the K-line chart on Futu Niu, and the owner used AutoNavi map to navigate while choosing his favorite songs on NetEase Cloud Music... With the in-depth cooperation of many head applications, Find N's goal is to make up for the last short board of the folding screen experience.
Turn the clock back to three months before the launch.
In September, after being rejected again by the QQ development team, the ColorOS team responsible for adapting to find N was shrouded in anxiety, frustration and uncertainty about whether the new machine could be released on time.
ColorOS wants to persuade QQ and other head applications to cooperate in the deep customization of the folding screen, for this has been working hard for nearly four months, the team has output more than 3,000 PPT adaptation solutions before and after, promised to provide cloud real machines, send special personnel to solve technical problems to reduce adaptation costs, and the project leader also personally ran to brush his face.
But the reply, in addition to the cookie-cutter refusal, is to ask OPPO mobile phones to provide pre-installation services - which is expected to bring hundreds of millions of dollars in costs.
After being rejected more than a dozen times, the ColorOS team visited again with a prototype of Find N (oppo's internal code name "Peacock") and showed the QQ team multi-task gestures and free hovering face-to-face... All kinds of innovative interactive experiences finally aroused QQ's interest, and nodded at the in-depth customization cooperation between the two sides.
At this time, less than three months before the release of the new Find N, the countdown to life and death belonging to ColorOS officially began.
Difficulty upgrades
It is not easy for "peacocks" to achieve "open screen". OPPO began planning in 2017, and in April 2018, the first prototype was born in-house.
In the external market, just one year after the birth of the peacock prototype, Samsung's first folding screen mobile phone Galaxy Fold was officially launched, and then more and more manufacturers launched a variety of folding screen products with in-fold, external folding, vertical folding, and horizontal folding schemes, but "Peacock" is still iterating repeatedly in silence.
Four years of grinding a sword, breakthrough solutions to industry problems such as creases, self-development of the best hinges and screen technology, the realization of free hover and other innovative interactions... The hardware and system are ready, and the plan to release Find N at oppo's future technology conference at the end of this year is finalized, and only the last step is for an innovative product to be born.
Enable third-party applications to deeply adapt to the screen size and interaction logic of Find N, and build a deeply customized software ecosystem for Find N.
Find N software and hardware basic research and development iterations consume too much time and energy, leaving only a few months of deep customization time for ColorOS head ecology, but these months are related to the efforts of the entire team in four years: if ColorOS can not complete the breakthrough of head application customization before the release of the new machine, then those hardware technology breakthroughs that consume a lot of time and effort will become "flashy" gimmicks.
In front of ColorOS is an ecological problem that has not been completely solved by the entire folding screen industry.
ColorOS has done an in-depth survey for folding screen users, and up to 71% of folding screen users believe that there is no difference between the use experience on the folding screen and on ordinary smartphones. In this case, spending a high price to buy a folding screen mobile phone is a "wrongful head", from "subversive innovation" to "folding screen useless" public opinion reversal, which occurs faster than industrial technology upgrading.
There is no breakthrough in the folding screen ecology, and the change in screen size is "folding for folding". The biggest challenge of the folding screen ecology is the head application - those who can open more than 4 or 5 times in an average of 1 day social, video, game, office and information APP, whether their experience is beautiful, determines the user's reputation for this folding screen mobile phone.
The eyes of the industry and the market are therefore increasingly focused on a branch line that is equally important as hardware upgrades: overthrowing the empiricism based on traditional large-screen mobile phones, rethinking and building the application ecology of exclusive folding screens according to the unique interactive logic of folding screen mobile phones, especially the deep customization of head applications.
The release time of the new machine is getting closer and closer, and ColorOS is also facing the mandatory question of building an application ecology, and it is from 0 and the difficulty is upgraded.
Different from the "rectangular" size of the folding screen mobile phone on the market, Find N uniquely adopts a large screen ratio of nearly 1:1. This is the design scheme set by the Find N after 26 attempts, which is the most easy to control gold size, and takes into account the experience of small hands such as women. But for the ColorOS team, the change in screen vertical and horizontal means that the vast majority of Android apps, including a handful of tablet apps, need to be re-adapted to find N.
In addition, parallel windows, free hover... Find N's cool and innovative interactions also raise the threshold of application adaptation. Higher development costs have deterred developers who already have doubts about the niche product of folding screens.
ColorOS needs to cooperate with application developers, but external communication has become the most difficult problem.
ColorOS decided to start with the most head app. Cooperate with the head application in the user's high-frequency use scenario first, if you can show a subversive user experience through deep customization, then the demonstration effect of the lower waist application will spontaneously follow. Moreover, the experience and solutions accumulated in the cooperation between ColorOS and the head application can be reused in cooperation with more developers, lowering the threshold for small and medium-sized developers, thereby driving the construction of the entire software ecosystem with points and areas.
But the reality is not as smooth as it seems. The head application itself has a very heavy development task, and the people served by the folding screen at this stage are extremely limited, the development is difficult, the income is small, and the developers are not willing to invest too much resources and manpower for the folding screen.
In fact, the entire industry is stuck in the folding screen deep customization link of the head application. According to Ge Ji, an adjunct professor at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and a former executive of China Mobile and GSMA, there are 3.5 million apps in China, but few have adapted to folding screen mobile phones. Since the beginning of 2019, Huawei has worked with the Software Green Alliance to try to build a folding screen ecological alliance, but there are not many head applications that Huawei Mate X2 can carry in February 2021.
Therefore, in the face of industry problems, ColorOS has repeatedly frustrated in communication with the head application, so there is a story of being rejected by the QQ team for more than three months.
A race of life and death
Without the use of the crowd, there is no developer willing to invest, and without deeply customized products, it is difficult to expand the crowd. ColorOS must break the "chicken or egg" cycle that folding screen phones are trapped in, and this requires a "killer app" belonging to Find N.
ColorOS still puts the breakthrough point on QQ. In the Tencent application group, QQ has always pursued novel functions and user experience, and OPPO's user groups are mostly Kochi youth, which has a high degree of overlap with the QQ user group. ColorOS firmly believes that Find N's innovation in technology and functions can impress the QQ team.
At the beginning of September, after repeated communication was fruitless, the ColorOS team visited again with the prototype, allowing the QQ team to experience the unique experience of Find N.
Oppo Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer Liu Zuohu mentioned two basic points when introducing Find N, which must be beautiful and easy to use, "should bring people a sense of pleasure, not a simple showmanship, and should not be a burden." In the prototype experience, the QQ team engineers who deal with the mobile phone system every day have indeed found a novel sense of pleasure from the use of Find N.
For example, Find N's unique free hover, which is one of the features that the QQ development team is most interested in. With the infinite hover of 0-180 ° under find N hinge technology, many innovative application scenarios can be derived after application adaptation, such as long-distance selfie in hover mode, upper screen chat during video calls, lower screen processing work, and lower screen as a trackpad in movie mode.
For example, ColorOS's exclusive system-level function is one-click multi-search. Through the negative screen and the entrance of full search, users can be supported to open multiple similar applications with a single search, such as in shopping scenarios, users can open multiple shopping platforms through a single search for price comparison.
Such "beautiful" and "easy to use" interactive functions specially created for folding screens have penetrated into all aspects of Find N. Including the entry-level input interaction link for mobile phones, ColorOS conducted a human factors study lasting 5 months and 1385 hours, precisely measured the operation mode of hundreds of folding screen users using the folding screen, including the angle between the thumb edge and the screen when holding, etc., and then through professional formula calculations, designed the current separation keyboard interaction mode that is most in line with the folding screen large screen two-hand input.
Find N and ColorOS in the technology, innovation interaction of the dead and industry breakthroughs, so that the QQ team began to re-examine the value and opportunities of folding screen products, coupled with the official release of ColorOS 12 in mid-September, once again let the QQ team recognize the technical and product strength of ColorOS, and finally nodded to this cooperation. The cooperation with QQ was finalized, colorOS promoted the head application to carry out the plan of deep customization of the folding screen, and found a breakthrough three months before the release of the new machine.
Followed by intense development work, under the cooperation of the two teams, QQ adapted to the folding screen has a completely different experience from the ordinary mobile phone version. During a video call, if the user is too busy to hold the phone, the Find N hover can be placed on the desktop and use the lower half of the screen to perform other operations at the same time.
The improvement of the hover mode on the user experience has also surprised the QQ team. More than a month ago, QQ, which was still saying "NO" to cooperation, took the initiative to issue a proposal for future cooperation for more than a month.
At the ODC Developer Conference held in late October this year, the head of the QQ R&D team came to Shanghai to propose to the Find N project leader that he hoped to carry out long-term cooperation and more in-depth customization for OPPO's next-generation folding screen.
With QQ's successful experience, ColorOS has conquered many Top-level applications in the remaining months, racing against time in communication, development, and repeated debugging.
ColorOS succeeded.
In the new Find N machine finally launched on December 15, Tencent Video, iQiyi, Youku, Pinduoduo, JD.com, Kuaishou, Futu Niuniu and other applications that users use frequently have achieved in-depth customization in cooperation with ColorOS. For example, the Find N version of Futu Niu, users do not need to wait for the jump when selecting stocks to quickly switch with the same screen; Find N version of "Peace Elite", players can enjoy a wider field of view, open the "physical plug-in". In contrast, Samsung, the first to release folding screen products, also launched a similar hover interaction, but the third-party application that has in-depth cooperation with Samsung is only 1 iQiyi.
The difficulty of head application cooperation can be imagined, and the release of the new machine, of course, the construction of the folding screen ecology is not the end. In colorOS' plan, it will continue to invest 300 million yuan in the future, and strive to achieve the optimization and adaptation of the folding screen of top 5000 applications.
Friends at home and abroad are also working hard for a more mature folding screen application ecology. Google released the Android Q operating system optimized for folding screens, Microsoft launched the Windows 10X operating system, and Huawei established a folding screen ecological alliance. In the latest terminal products, Huawei Mate X2 has achieved the large-screen adaptation of the top 200 applications in China, the Xiaomi MIX FOLD said that the Top 300 App large screen is all compatible and adapted, and the OPPO Find N has achieved more than 80% of the TOP3000 folding screen application adaptation rate and the deep customization of the head application, which marks the industry's exploration of the folding screen ecology and a big step forward.
In the longer term, in the process of deeply customizing the software ecology for the folding screen, the accumulated ecological service construction experience and diversified adaptation schemes can also be applied to more ColorOS ecosystems, including smart phones, smart TVs, smart watches, etc., and gradually converge into an open, multi-terminal software ecology.
Liu Zuohu called Find N "OPPO's answer to the next development of smart phones", and colorOS' customized folding screen ecology for Find N is like an answer to the next development of the smart terminal software ecology.
At the 2020 Future Science and Technology Conference, OPPO officially proposed the "3+N+X" science and technology transition strategy, taking "software engineering capabilities" as the hub of the science and technology transition strategy - backward compatible hardware ecology, upward support application ecology, horizontal access to multiple system docking ecology, and full support for OPPO's multi-terminal, multi-scenario, multi-market product innovation capabilities in the era of mutual integration of all things.
At this year's ODC conference, OPPO proposed a user-centered "ubiquitous service ecosystem". Different from the App ecology in the traditional app store and the mini program ecology that has emerged subsequently, with the development of network connection speed, the development of the end-edge cloud, and the development of human-computer interaction, the future of "ubiquitous service" will form an ecology that is no longer dominated by hardware oligarchs or a channel, exists on top of all hardware devices, and follows people.
If you feel that this vision is too cutting-edge and too abstract, then you can see ColorOS' breakthrough in the folding screen ecology as a staged and concrete answer to how the ubiquitous ecology is realized. The head application is willing to cooperate with ColorOS to carry out ecological exploration of the folding screen, which is also a recognition of ColorOS's scientific and technological strength and ecological power.
The future is here.