2023 in smartphones: it was the little things

  News, Rassegna Stampa
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Smartphones — the gadgets I spend most of my waking hours thinking about, testing, and tinkering with — are generally considered a mature product category. This means that, in any of the previous, oh, five years, you’d struggle to find a big defining moment for the industry. Likewise, there was no “iPhone” moment in 2023, and I’ll bet you 20 bucks we won’t see one in 2024, either.

But that’s not to say that it wasn’t an interesting year for mobile tech; far from it. We didn’t have a singular, spectacular innovation: just a bunch of smaller ones that, altogether, could make a big difference in the long run. 

Life got a little easier for partnerships and group chats that include Android and iPhone-owning members, for example. We have new photo editing tools at our disposal that muddy the lines between a photograph and a memory. And with just a few more square millimeters of screen real estate, foldable phones became a lot more useful. Those individual innovations might not seem to make a big splash in the 2023 consumer tech yearbook, but they’re more consequential than they might seem.

Here is my take on these three trends of 2023.

When I say that life got easier for Android / iPhone households, I could mean that in a broad sense, but specifically I mean my house. My husband and the vast majority of our friends own iPhones, but most of the year, I use an Android phone. This means that I’m usually responsible for ruining a group chat with my green bubbles, reducing the quality of the photos and videos we share with each other to a low-res mess. This creates a situation where I have to ask people to send photos directly to my husband, or share them on Google Photos, or simply print them out at a Walgreens and mail them to my house c/o Tim Cook. It’s a disaster.

So imagine the utter thrill when we discovered that the photos our friends sent from our Thanksgiving gathering weren’t reduced to pixelated garbage in the group chat — at least for the iPhone owners. That’s because iOS 17 quietly introduced a change that allows people on iOS to keep using iMessage features with each other even if someone else is using an Android device. That doesn’t fix the situation for an Android user just yet, but at least my husband can download the high-res images and add them to our shared album without having to side-channel our friends.

I’m usually responsible for ruining a group chat with my green bubbles

There’s more good news: Apple said that in 2024, it would start supporting RCS — the updated messaging protocol that Android uses as a replacement for the ancient SMS and MMS standards. We have a ton of questions about how this will actually work, but at the very least it seems that Android users will finally get high-quality photo and video sharing in group chats with iPhone owners. Not perfect parity, but it seems that’s the best we’re going to get in the near term: efforts to skirt around the high walls of iMessage’s garden have resulted in major security risks and swift takedowns from Apple.

If you live outside the US, this will sound thoroughly uninteresting, and to be fair, it kind of is. But the majority of phones sold in the US are iPhones and most everyone uses iMessage because we’re all apparently allergic to WhatsApp. Losing access to iMessage is a major deterrent for anyone on an iPhone who might entertain switching, so a little more parity in the group chat experience is very promising for a future where Android and iPhone owners coexist more peacefully — heck, we can even share chargers now.

The difference between a 1.9-inch screen and a 3.4-inch screen doesn’t sound like much, but on the outer panel of the Galaxy Z Flip 5 it actually makes a big difference. The Flip 5’s cover screen got a little bigger and a lot handier this year; with the Flip 4’s smaller screen, you couldn’t do much more than check notifications and press pause on your music player. It’s a different story on the Flip 5 and the Motorola Razr Plus, which technically beat Samsung to the whole big-outer-screen-flip-phone thing by a couple of months. These phones let you actually type out a response to a text, add an event to your calendar, and check the composition on a selfie with an image that’s bigger than a postage stamp.