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| Sundar Pichai in Lagos |
For many years Nigerian writer and entrepreneur
Okechukwu Ofili was frustrated with the time it took the traditional publishing
industry to put out books from local authors. It created a kind of traffic jam
for writers. So Ofili took inspiration from Nigeria’s okada motorcycle taxis —
which can cut through Lagos’s traffic whenever it’s slow — to design
Okadabooks, a nimble mobile app that lets Africans quickly and easily publish
smartphone books. Today, Nigerians can get 10,000 titles on the app, many of
them cheaper than an actual okada ride.
Like many company founders, Ofili found a new
solution to an old problem by tapping into the smartphone revolution that is
transforming the world. But he also represents something new — a global spirit
of technological innovation where local entrepreneurs are tackling local
challenges themselves rather than waiting for tech from other regions to reach
them. Ofili — along with many Nigerians, Brazilians, Indonesians, and Indians —
is part of a trend that is about to redefine the Internet: “building for
billions.”
Building for billions means designing new
technology for everyone from the very start of the design process. The people
coming online through smartphones are using the Internet in radically new ways,
and there is a massive potential for creativity and innovation in trying to
help them solve their problems with the technology they have in their hands.
The future of the Internet will be written by people like Ofili and by the
people he’s building for. More than ever, high-tech companies like Google need
to focus on reshaping our apps, services, and platforms to work for the
majority of the planet.
I personally know how much technology can change
lives. Growing up in India, I remember the day we got a landline phone in the
1980s. The phone opened up a new world, and from there onward, those moments I
encountered a new technology would help me mark the different stages of my
life: the first computer I was able to use at college, my first cell phone, and
my first smartphone. I’ve always been fascinated by how tech works and the
mechanics of it. But it’s equally exciting to think how a single piece of
technology can change a life.
This made me take great interest a decade ago in
the One Laptop Per Child mission to build a US$100 laptop for every child on
the planet. In recent years, smartphones look to be partially fulfilling that
goal of making technology more accessible. Google’s Android mobile operating
system alone powers two billion active devices. Smartphones, which now come
cheaper than US$100, have more power than a cheap laptop from ten years ago and
millions of apps available for download.
We should not become complacent, however, that
the spread of smartphones completely bridges the digital divide. The push for
more affordable smartphones is far from over. There is a lot of potential to
create cheaper phones that don’t sacrifice much quality. We recently announced
a new program called Android Go that we hope will bring standard smartphone
functions to phones with low memory and promote apps that work well those
devices. But when thinking about building for the billions who will use those
phones, we need a second revolution to solve the next three major gaps:
reliability of connection, data costs and relevant content.
Two-thirds of Nigerian mobile users, for example,
are on 2G connections, which makes it difficult for people to read websites,
let alone watch videos. (This is also bad for web publishers since we found
that a majority of users abandon a website if it doesn’t load after three
seconds.) Data can also be prohibitive: the average price of data in
Sub-Saharan Africa is more than double the average in India and 50% more than
the average in in Indonesia. And even with better connections, there may not be
the information online that users are looking for. Even though Hindi is one of
the most spoken languages in the world, at 370 million native speakers, it’s
not even in the top 30 languages used on the Internet.
At Google, we have a team called Next Billion
Users who travel the world to hear about people’s Internet pain points and
think up new solutions. Their experiences led them to build programs like
Google Station, a model for improved connectivity that is already bringing
millions of people high-quality Internet access at more than 100 Indian
Railways stations. We have meanwhile adapted our Search, Chrome, YouTube, and
Maps apps to work for users with unreliable or intermittent connectivity,
through reducing data consumption or allowing content to be taken offline for
later use. We invest into making more languages work on smartphones through
open-source fonts, flexible keyboards, handwriting and voice inputs, so that
people don’t have to learn English — or learn to type — just to use the
Internet. And we are piloting new apps that serve new Internet users’ specific
needs, including YouTube Go, an offline-first video app that works during low
or no connectivity.
But the work of one company isn’t enough. The
biggest change we can make is by empowering other developers and companies to
solve these issues. There are three core lessons that Google’s learned over the
last few years building for billions, and in sharing them we hope other app
developers can more quickly reach the newest billion Internet users:
Reduce data required to use your apps. A third of
global smartphones have less than 1 GB of storage, so apps need to be small.
India’s Ola Cabs fixed the problem of heavy native apps by creating a
Progressive Web App (PWA) — a lightweight mobile website that feels like an
app. Their PWA is only 0.5MB and takes up just 50KB of data on its first
payload and then 10 KB on subsequent loads. This greatly opens up the number of
people in India who can call up an Ola cab.
Optimise for speed. For users on 2G, it can take
25 seconds to load a webpage and use 1MB of (very expensive) data. So in 2015,
we started optimizing webpages for users on slow connections in Indonesia,
India, and Brazil which load four times faster and use 80% fewer bytes. This
did not just improve users’ experiences but publishers are getting 50% more
traffic from these lighter web pages.
Speak multiple languages. In India, we found that
people would switch between Hindi and English to figure out which language provided
the best information. In response, we set up what we call “tabbed search,”
which lets you quickly flip between the search results in each language. Given
this option, users are searching 50% more.
While these concepts might seem simple, they’ve
proven remarkably powerful as core design principles. And if you want to know
more, we have more tips for designing for the new reality of the world’s
Internet at developers.google.com/billions.
Today, there are 2.8 billion smartphone users globally, and there will be hundreds of millions more by the end of the year. The Internet is becoming truly global, and we believe that this will give developers from Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia an unprecedented new canvas for their talent and entrepreneurialism. And as people come online for the first time, we must train more developers in those countries, since they are the closest to local users’ needs and can build apps that work best for them. And this is great for the globe. Building within the kinds of constraints Ofili faces gives developers a head start in the new rush to the wider trend of building for billions. Catering to the Internet’s next billion users is not just about expanding familiar tech to new places, but developing new things for the future.
Sundar Pichai is Google's
chief executive officer.
Culled from PUNCH BLOG
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