If you can’t beat them, how about take over their home screen? It seems that what
Yahoo is doing with its acquisition of
Aviate, an app that, as the Aviate team says, “...will dramatically alter your homescreen for the better...”
Aviate was launched in alpha last summer and went to Beta in October. Aviate auto-categorizes apps on Android phones and gathers them into “spaces.” By using signals to understand a user’s context - WIFI, GPS, Accelerometer, Time, etc - Aviate automatically surfaces information at the moment it’s useful. So whether the user is just waking up, driving, at work, or maybe out for the night, Aviate learns their habits and helps anticipate the information and apps they need.
There is no more prime real estate on any mobile device than the homescreen and if Yahoo can control that space on Android with its new app, imagine what they can do. We can think of all sorts of ways, but we will wait and see how Yahoo makes rolls this play out.