Computers seem ubiquitous – but traditional desktops and laptops are still a rarity in much of the developing world that we visit. However, mobile phones (and increasingly smartphones) are making their presence felt in even the most remote parts of the world as mobile data connectivity improves and prices for hardware and usage plans plummet! Today, android smartphone that are less than $50 are available. No wonder then, that a majority of digital media consumption is in the mobile world. But it is not by any means equitable usage – for example in the US, even though almost 80% of smartphone users use Apps nearly every day, only 7% power users account for half the download activity! Most of the activity in the US is around social media (e.g. facebook), entertainment (e.g. YouTube, radio, Netflix, etc.), maps (google maps, apple maps), mail, weather, games, news, and shopping Apps currently. In the developing world, mobiles play an even more important role – over 90% of digital minutes are using mobiles in Indonesia (86% in India, 67% in China).
Mobile Apps offer a great new way to intuitively (ask any kid!) click, flick, and swipe our way to access content on mobile devices. Mobile Apps account for 86% of the mobile time rather than mobile web use in the developing world (94% in Argentina, 88% in India) – just a bit higher than in the developed world (e.g. 87% for USA, 80% for UK). 70% of the digital population in India use ONLY mobiles to access the digital world (compared to 4% in Germany or 12% in USA) – in fact, Facebook, which has over 1.1 billion monthly active mobile-only users, alone accounts for 17% of all time on iOS and Android connected devices! Only the top 30 Apps account for 40% of all mobile minutes (even higher at 60% in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Mexico). Although the largest proportion (~20%) of the Apps out there are games, the App minutes are dominated (~30%) by social media/messaging.
It is hard to believe that a decade ago we had virtually no mobile apps! Today, statistics show that there are more than 2.8 million Apps on Android Google Play (with 65 billion downloads since its start) and 2.2 million Apps on the Apple AppStore (with 190 billion downloads since 2008), generating about 189 billion USD in revenues through the App pricing and in-App advertising. However, more than half the 2.5 billion smartphone users or 1.2 billion tablet (e.g. Apple’s iPAD or Samsung Tablets) users don’t download new Apps even in the developed world (e.g. only 36% in the US or 23% of the users in the UK download more than one App!). Also, users tend to spend 77% of their time on their top 3 Apps! There is a need to help wade through the millions of Apps out there - but there’s probably going to be an App for that (augmented with AI to help customize choices for you)!
Native Mobile Apps are often better than web portals as they offer better experience through an intuitive touch interface, personalization, location services, notification, use device features, etc. Often, you will find that several services (e.g. Google maps, news organizations) create parallel channels for users to access and interact with their content – e.g. full-fledged web portals, mobile websites, and native mobile Apps for iOS, Android, and Windows – customized to best use the comparative advantages of each device. Sometimes, developing a mobile-friendly responsive design site is preferred to reduce costs rather than developing native Apps across platforms, although the boundaries are blurring in this regard.
We are still at the tip of the iceberg in terms of exploring the potential of mobile Apps in development work. There are a number of ways in which the power of crowdsourcing can be applied to the development of new Apps – e.g. Appathons (building on the concept of Hackathons and competitions such as Apps for Development and Apps for Climate).