Quicktext: The iPhone App that will never see the day

For the past months i have been working with a couple of guys (Jeremie Kletzkine et Olivier Haddad) on a very simple iPhone app that i thought was critical to the user experience. We recently came to the conclusion it was not feasible to create it in decent conditions because the iPhone SDK does not allow such thing. We called it internally "QuickText" and since we believe it can't be done for now, i'd like to share the idea with you to get your feedback.

The idea was to solve one of the biggest pain related to the iPhone: writting on the keyboard and in particular repetitive writting. As you will notice there are phrases, expressions, character strings you are writting very often and that become a pain becomes they just take too much time when accumulated altogether: your email, your telephone, address, signature expressions....Some equivalent to Text Expander that Mac users should know

QuickText was supposed to help you solve this pain by helping the user define shortcuts to those expressions: for exemple you write "tel" and "+14155625XXX" appears, or "bye bye" becomes " See you later, Your Name". Actually Quicktext has nearly no user interface since it is present wherever you are composing text (email, facebook app, twitter, safari...) and runs in the background (first problem). There is just one single screen that enables you to create those shortcuts, we predefine some keyfields (your email, actually we take directly from settings, your phone we take directly for the SIM card,....) and you just need to complete to start. Dead easy to use, Dead easy to set up. Minimum investment, Maximum comfort.

So we met two major issues with this app:

1. it can't be done in the legal SDK context. Quicktext would have needed to run in the background (for example, once your run your email application) and Apple does not allow that. This is a big issue since we would have not enjoyed the AppStore distribution. But we were ready to go for the jailbreak path, just for the fun...
2. In the Jailbreak mode (a few millions users still) we had another issue: there was no way to find in the SDK a rule that enabled the iPhone to trigger an event from the keyboard. It sounds like it is similar to the auto-suggestion mode for text but it is not, and even so Apple does not allow you to access those rules.

We eventually found a "solution" which was to create a separate text editor (like FireMail) where we would have created this feature and where QuickText would have worked but i figured out the business interest was too limited.

Just for the sake it, here was the idea around the business model: The app would have been free for 5 shortcuts and you would have to pay a premium (maybe 2 USD) for more. But the real model was not really to make money around this app but to build a critical size of users to distribute other apps..

I am dead sure Quicktext would have been very popular from day 1 even in the Jailbreak community. This feature exists on any smart phone (eg: BlackBerry). Like Copy/Paste i am pretty sure Apple will come up with something unless they change the SDK by then

So what do you say?

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