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Every Mobile App You’ve Ever Used Has This One Feature
And you may have never have heard its name or even noticed it was there
When I wake up, I start blearily tapping at my phone to stop its droning. My alarm is a song that I used to like, but now despise because I’ve come to associate it with waking me up. Now that my phone is in my hand, I roll over and check Twitter, my emails, my messages, Instagram, Reddit, Medium, and all those sites that I can scroll through essentially for all eternity. Throughout the day, even once I’m out of bed and caffeinated, I scroll. My thumb drags up dozens of apps, hundreds or maybe thousands of screens’ worth of content.
Some estimates say that each day the average person scrolls more than a mile with their thumb, which, thanks to our sedentary lifestyles, may be further than we walk over the same time period. And all of these apps, on all of these platforms, built by all of these billion-dollar Silicon Valley unicorns, have one thing in common. They are all built using the same fundamental component: the table. In fact, I can say — almost with a straight face — that this single user interface component may have become the foundation of contemporary Western society.
In Android, it’s called TableLayout and in iOS, its technical name is a UITableView. If you’ve used an iPhone or Android device at all, it’ll be immediately familiar to you:
This style of the screen doesn’t just appear in official Apple apps, but in third-party apps too. Even companies that compete with Apple use this same look. Behind the scenes, iOS apps use a framework that creates the TableView called CocoaTouch, and by default, it appears identical regardless of which company made the app. Glancing at the apps above, it’s not obvious that the screen on the left is from an app made by Apple and the screen on the right was made by Facebook.
Of course, these are just settings screens. But thanks to how flexible it is, the TableView powers millions of apps today.
