Twitter has just introduced auto-playing video, Vines and gifs on mobile. “Oh great!” you may say: “Just what we needed! … more things to, er, chew through our data and battery life?”
To be fair to Twitter, you can opt out and revert to click-to-play (see below), but Twitter could have just made autoplay opt in. Instead it is forcing users to hunt out a setting and check a box just to keep things the way they were.
Twitter isn’t the only one. Autoplay is taking over our smartphones. Facebook rolled out autoplay months ago. Instagram has autoplay if you don’t scroll quickly enough and everything else is moving that way, for good reason.
It makes sense for the tech companies, as autoplaying videos are arguably more eye catching and engaging, increasing the amount of video plays they can claim, which is music to advertisers’ ears.
But will no one think of the users? Autoplay has some serious downsides – and not just the potential for sudden annoying sound blaring out of the speaker in public, even if they’re muted by default at the moment.
Say goodbye to your mobile data allowance. To automatically play a video or gif the app needs to download said video first. That means every video in your feed, whether you care about it or not, will be automatically downloaded if you go anywhere near it. You better hope you’re on Wi-Fi.
What’s more the obsession with autoplay is bleeding over to whole articles. Facebook’s Instant articles on its iPhone app, which are designed to load instantly within Facebook when you tap on a link can only do so if they have already downloaded the content. Even if you don’t read it.
Snapchat’s Discover section got into trouble for doing just that, destroying users’ data allowances.
And it’s not just your data allowance this hurts. Why is your battery down to 30% by lunchtime? It’s those videos being automatically downloaded. After the screen, the mobile data connection is one of the biggest drains on a modern smartphone.
Constantly pulling down big files, such as videos, taxes the battery at the best of times, but when you’ve got poor signal or are stuck on a packed commuter with many other people all eating up the bandwidth, it’s even worse.
You know those times you have solid signal but nothing happens when you tap on a link, short of the phone getting hot and draining the battery? That’s because there are too many people for the network to deal with. And that’s what will happen all the more frequently when autoplay insists on downloading all videos while you’re stuck elbow to armpit.
And then there’s performance. Smartphones often feel slow, particularly if they’re a year old. Autoplay will make it worse, because having all those videos playing in the stream as you scroll is hard work for the phone.
You might not notice it on your new iPhone 6s or Samsung Galaxy S6s but on older models or on smartphones that didn’t cost £300-plus in the first place, autoplay will slow down the experience, particularly when scrolling.
So it might look pretty, having all those gifs spinning through automatically, but it makes the pain points of smartphones – the battery life and performance – even worse.
Instead of sticking with tap-to-play, something which has been working just fine for the last couple of years, autoplay is being forced on to us in the name of progress and revenue models. When did the tech companies forget the user experience is key?