Digital Media Inquisitor — 009
When mobile app and web versions of a digital media service do not have feature parity
This totally drives me nuts! Let me give you an example of a feature that’s available on a mobile app, but not on the desktop version. And also an example of a desktop feature that’s not available on the digital media service’s corresponding mobile app.
Why does this happen? Is it because there are different product teams and they do not compare their separate feature sets? It really does not make sense to me as the user, because I expect these services to perform the same regardless of device.
Do you have further examples beyond the ones I detail following? Share them in the comments ..
LinkedIn — You can only “Save Articles” via their mobile app
On the mobile app version of LinkedIn you can book mark a link (example — maybe a news article) in your feed which will be saved to your “Saved Articles” folder within your “Dashboard”. Let’s say you see someone post an article you want to read later…
I saw the following article, and I clicked the “bookmark” button to put it in my “Saved Articles”. You can see where I clicked “bookmark” button, highlighted in blue, lower right corner of the mobile screen.
It’s pretty easy to find “Your Dashboard” on your mobile app version of LinkedIn. You can click through to “Saved Items” to find the article you bookmarked.
Meanwhile, there is NO such “Saved Items” folder on LinkedIn’s desktop version of “Your Dashboard”. Unless I am missing something!? Check out the desktop version ..
When I click through to “See All Activity” on the desktop web version of LinkedIn — all I can see are articles I “liked”. You won’t find the “Saved Articles” from mobile under the desktop link “See All Activity”.
The good news is that I can “like” an article from either LinkedIn version. Meanwhile, none of the “Saved Articles” are accessible unless you return to the LinkedIn mobile app.
The only way for me to save an item for later reading on LinkedIn’s desktop web service is to “Like” it, and then access my “Activity Feed”.
But what if I don’t “like” an article in the LinkedIn news feed and I just want to save it? Well, I would have to do that within the mobile app.
Because I use both versions of LinkedIn, I’m skipping the “bookmark” / “Save this Article” feature because of it’s exclusivity to mobile.
I will instead continue to “like” articles that maybe I do not “like” but just want to “save”.
“Highlighting Areas” — A Cool Google Maps Feature — for desktop only
Before I began my dual career in digital media and music, I was a cartographer, a.k.a. a “map maker”. I even have a Bachelor of the Arts in Geography from the University of Colorado to prove it. So I obsess over maps, and I particularly love the cartographic beauty and many features Google Maps offer.
So Google Maps has this great feature, when you enter a neighborhood, town, or city, into the search bar on the desktop web, the specific area’s borders will be highlighted with red and also transparent red fill over the whole area.
It’s a really great way to understand the defined area of a place. For instance, typing in “East Williamsburg” allows me to see the extent of this neighborhood in Brooklyn and it’s specific boundaries. I often tell people that when they refer to “Bushwick” that in fact they are mentioning a place that’s really in “East Williamsburg”. This Google area highlight feature really helps me get my inner Geography nerd on, and validates many of my very detailed geographic claims.
Unfortunately, this area highlight feature is not available in the Google Maps iOS app. At least not yet. All you will get if you search for “East Williamsburg” on Google Maps app is a dot that shows you the center of the neighborhood which is nowhere as useful as seeing the neighborhood’s full area extent and boundaries.
And then I found a hack to find feature parity between Google Maps on my desktop and my phone with this “area highlight” feature.
I skipped the Google Maps app and went right to the mobile browser to — http://maps.google.com — and entered “East Williamsburg”. It returned the same result as the desktop web.
And yet, Google is imploring me here on my mobile to use the Google Maps mobile app, when it doesn’t have this “area highlight” feature.
Again I don’t know why this kind of stuff frustrates me. I suppose it’s because I’m a digital media super user and I just notice these differences between desktop and mobile apps. The Google Maps issue isn’t quite as important as the LinkedIn issue. Not being able to “Save Articles” on the LinkedIn desktop is just so strange to me.
Thanks for reading. Let me know if you’ve encountered other desktop vs mobile feature disconnects with some of your favorite digital media services in the comments below.
