Yahoo Aviate

» see getaviate.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

aviate was a third-party android launcher whose pitch was that your home screen should know what you wanted before you tapped. mornings showed you weather and the day's calendar. arriving at a restaurant after 7 pm surfaced foursquare and yelp on the same screen without you searching for them. the engineering team behind it was a small group out of palo alto called thumbsup labs, founded in 2013 by paul mcdonald and mark daiss, both ex-google. the launcher came out in private beta in mid 2013 and went into a wider public beta in october of the same year. the press at the time was warm. android police and the verge both wrote it up favorably.

yahoo bought thumbsup labs on january 7, 2014, days before marissa mayer's ces keynote where she announced the acquisition. the price was reported at around $80 million in cash. yahoo's strategy under mayer at the time was to acquire mobile teams and rebrand their products as yahoo properties to seed the company's pivot to mobile. summly had been bought in 2013 and rebadged as yahoo news digest. aviate followed the same playbook. the launcher was renamed yahoo aviate, then promoted in the play store, then bundled in pre-installs through partnerships with samsung galaxy s5 owners in india and a few other markets in 2014 and 2015.

the product itself was not bad. the contextual switching worked. the app drawer's automatic categorization was useful in a way that stock android did not match until well into 2017. the problem was that android launchers as a category live or die on word of mouth, and yahoo's brand on android was a liability rather than an asset by 2014. the kind of android user who installed third-party launchers usually had specific opinions about who they would trust with home-screen real estate, and yahoo was not on most of those lists. nova launcher and apex launcher kept growing through the same window while aviate flattened.

verizon bought yahoo in june 2017 and folded it into the oath subsidiary. the cost-cutting that followed killed a long list of small yahoo products. aviate's end-of-support notice went out on february 2, 2018 with a hard date of march 8 for the lights-off. there was no migration path. users who had built a long context-aware home screen across years had to manually rebuild it on whatever launcher they switched to next. yahoo would later launch a separate, unrelated yahoo launcher for samsung galaxy phones, which itself was killed quickly when reception was poor and security warnings about its permission scopes surfaced.

i missed aviate. i was running stock samsung touchwiz on whatever galaxy i had at the time, with no real appetite for third-party launchers after a brief 2011 experiment with go launcher that taught me how easy it was to lose your home screen layout when the launcher developer pushed a bad update. aviate's pitch sounded sensible on paper. by 2014 my launcher choices had settled into "the one that came with the phone" and i never went back to tinkering. the launcher market in turkey was thin enough that aviate's india push and us push largely missed me anyway.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

aviate was one of the more sophisticated contextual ui experiments of the early 2010s. the launcher exposed a small number of named "spaces" like home and work and going out. each space was populated with cards rather than icons. one card might show the next calendar event and another might surface nearby coffee shops. the cards rotated as your context changed. the design borrowed from google now's card stack but applied it to the home screen rather than to a swipe-right panel. for a brief window in 2014 google now's own card stack and aviate's spaces felt like two paths the android home screen could go down. neither one ended up being the path that actually won.

~ what came after ~

google now itself absorbed most of the cleanly-correct ideas from aviate's design language. predictive cards based on time and location became part of the google app's flow by 2015 and were a major feature of the pixel launcher's at a glance widget by 2016. the engineering team from thumbsup labs got dispersed during yahoo's 2015 to 2017 layoff cycles. paul mcdonald left in 2017. the small piece of aviate's tech that survived publicly was a smart-stream content feed that lived briefly in the yahoo mobile app and disappeared with the rest of the brand reorg.

~ the funny part ~

the funny part is that aviate's central pitch was directionally right and arrived too early. by 2024 google's at a glance widget and samsung's modes and routines feature both did roughly what aviate had pitched in 2013, only baked into the os instead of riding on top as a third-party launcher. context-aware home screens turned out to be a feature of the operating system rather than a product of its own. the team that had the idea first ended up inside yahoo at the moment yahoo stopped being able to ship things, then dissolved while the idea slowly diffused into the platforms.

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