Shifting Baseline Syndrome: Why we treat “new” features as if they were always available

I was taking a mobile app development class online, watching the professor walk through Android’s version history slide by slide — chronologically, feature by feature. He pointed out a handful of things that felt like they should be much older than they actually are.

I couldn’t see the room, but I could hear him reassuring people; there was clearly a ripple of surprise on the other end that he was responding to in real time.

Now, you need to understand that most of the students there are Gen Z and Gen Alpha, generations that got their phones already finished, with all of this baked in as if it had always been there. I can’t blame them, and neither should you — all of us tend to take things for granted! In fact, there is a term in ecology that perfectly describes this: shifting baseline syndrome.

Every new generation assumes the conditions it grew up in are simply “normal,” because it has no memory of what came before it.

So if you had face unlock since your first phone, for you, this is just how phones work. Nothing special. Yet some of us who unlock our iPhones with Face ID today remember unlocking our Sony Ericsson k750i with a special combination of buttons.

I went and checked the actual dates on a few of these myself.

Unlocking your phone

For a long time the only options were a PIN or a pattern.

Fingerprint unlock as a standard feature arrives with the iPhone 5S in 2013.

Face ID doesn’t show up until 2017, with the iPhone X.

That’s a four-year gap between “finger” and “face,” and yet today both feel like they’ve always coexisted as equally old, equally basic options — nobody experiences fingerprint unlock as the transitional technology it actually was.

Paying with your phone

This one is very interesting! Even the biggest players didn’t get the format right on the first try.

NFC support landed in Android in 2010–2011 (depending on which release you count as the real starting point). Google Wallet, the first serious tap-to-pay attempt, followed in 2011.

Apple Pay didn’t arrive until 2014.

And Google’s own product got rebranded and restructured in the meantime. Android Pay became Google Pay in 2018, years after the underlying feature first shipped.

“Tap your phone and pay,” something we now do without a second thought, has existed as a mass-adopted, reliable thing for under fifteen years. Imagine: the generations before us had to carry their wallets longer than some of us had the option not to.

Dark mode

System-wide dark mode — applying to the whole phone, not just a single app — arrived on Android and iOS in the same year: 2019. Hello! Seven years ago! Or, if you pretend Covid didn’t happen: Like, two years ago!

Something we now treat as a basic setting is younger than TikTok (2017).

Notifications

Push notifications in general showed up in 2009 on iOS and 2010 on Android. Before that, third-party apps couldn’t alert you to anything in the background. You had to open them to check.

iMessage added Tapback, its emoji reactions to a message, in 2016. But those reactions working reliably between Android and iPhone was only standardized in 2024. An emoji reaction displaying correctly regardless of which phone the other person uses is a problem that looks trivial and long-solved. It’s only fully worked since last year!

How recent is “always”?

Laid out on their own, none of these dates are that surprising. Lined up next to the events we already agree were recent — the ones that still feel like current history, not distant history — the gap disappears fast.

It is interesting to see how bad we are at tracking the speed of the changes while they occur. A feature ships, and within months it stops registering as a feature at all — it just becomes part of “how phones work,” and we backdate it in our heads to whenever feels intuitively “old enough.”