Most people love their smartphones more than they do their personal computers. The biggest reason by far is that smartphones bring the internet to them everywhere, but another less obvious reason is that using smartphones is like driving an automatic¹. They are way less demanding than Macs or PCs running Windows, and I don’t just mean maintenance. Certainly running updates and installing software is more manual in macOS and Windows, but that occasional maintenance pales in comparison to the constant manual user intervention involved with merely using those platforms. Where should this file live? Which of them sync? How should my windows be arranged? When should I close them? What should I even do with the desktop? Which apps actually need full disk access?

By contrast, the default experiences of iOS and Android don’t really demand any manual intervention or decision making from their users. There are no windows to deal with or files to manage. Any need for user intervention is optional and progressively disclosed behind apps and/or features. Photos, notes, music, and other documents are typically managed within their respective apps. Both iOS and Android have any number of settings that can be tinkered with. People can intervene more with their smartphones, but they don’t have to.

Personal computers do have a more automatic platform of sorts, the web. Like with smartphones, many people prefer web apps over traditional native ones. Web based apps are so automatic that they are effectively on demand. No one has to install GMail, Google Docs, or Slack. They just go to some website where they always get the latest version of whatever app when needed. Web apps also don’t require users to deal with windows or files. Their emails, flow charts, conversations, and other documents are all self contained within one browser window. Like smartphones, users can customize their experience and manually manage their documents, but again, they don’t have to.

Given most people prefer automatic platforms, why hasn’t Android, iOS, or the web completely overtaken macOS and Windows? Why aren’t offices filled with Chromebooks and iPads? I think most people who prefer automatic platforms end up using manual ones on personal computers for three reasons: familiarity, apps, and cross-app productivity. They want something familiar with what they already use and need specific apps that all work cohesively with the other ones they use.

Google’s ChromeOS found on Chromebooks is very familiar to many people who are already using web apps like Gmail, Google Docs, and Slack. ChromeOS has even visually converged with Windows. The problem is ChromeOS has limited software support outside of web apps and while web apps do support a growing number of use cases, gaps remain. This is why, I presume, Google is merging ChromeOS into its non-web based Android platform.

iPadOS has much better app support, but is unfamiliar and often times cumbersome to someone coming from Windows or macOS. In other words, iPads are a little weird for those who already have an expectation of what a computer is. This is best illustrated by the fact that Apple still doesn’t sell an iPad with a keyboard and trackpad included. They are optional add-ons that need to be purchased separately. Part of me wonders how many companies would jump at the chance to buy their teams a laptop running iPadOS in lieu of similarly priced MacBooks or even cheaper PC laptops.

That said, I think many professionals would still cling to macOS and Windows even in a world where ChromeOS was merged with Android or Apple did release a laptop running iPadOS, because neither would inherently address or improve those platforms’ limitations when it comes to cross-app productivity. Furthermore, I suspect most avenues of improving cross-app productivity on these platforms would be in tension with what makes them so automatic to begin with². ChromeOS, Android, and iOS (including iPadOS) are automatic largely because they defer the complexity of manual intervention to apps that mostly exist in isolation of one another. This simplifies the platform, but makes working across apps much more cumbersome. I wrote about this when addressing Catalyst apps’ lack of cohesion in macOS.

The more complicated Mac builds ease almost entirely through cohesion. Wherever possible, Mac applications are expected to share the same shortcuts, controls, windowing behavior, etc… so users can immediately find their bearings regardless of the application. This also means that several applications existing in the same space largely share the same visual and UX language. Having Finder, Safari, BBEdit and Transmit open on the same desktop looks and feels natural.

By comparison, the bulk of iOS’s simplicity stems from a single app paradigm. Tap an icon on the home screen to enter an app that takes over the entire user experience until exited. Cohesion exists and is still important, but its surface area is much smaller because most iOS users only ever see and use a single app at a time. For better and worse, the single app paradigm allows for more diverse conventions within apps. Having different conventions for doing the same thing across multiple full screen apps is not an issue because users only have to ever deal with one of those conventions at a given time. That innocuous diversity becomes incongruous once those same apps have to live side-by-side.

I do think personal computers will become more automatic, either through the evolution of macOS and/or Windows, or the advent of some other platform. Apple once thought that “some other platform” was going to be i(Pad)OS and Google seemingly still believes it’s going to be some amalgam of ChromeOS and Android, but I don’t think either can overtake today’s manual incumbents. They’ve achieved being more automatic largely by only supporting one app at a time. That is perfectly suitable for smartphone and web apps, but for multiple apps running side-by-side on personal computers, people need an automatic platform that won’t slow them down.