NEW YORK — Apps are broken. It is absurd that we have to discover, download and crowd our devices with apps we rarely if ever use.
For every iPhone sold, 119 apps have been downloaded, a number that has steadily crept up, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Yet we use fewer than a quarter of those apps in any given month.
The numbers are particularly discouraging for developers. The average app loses 77% of its users within three days after it’s downloaded. In the US, 30% of the time when an app is downloaded, a person never opens it more than twice.
We’ve all deleted apps to free space on our phones, or been appalled at mobile websites demanding we download their app for a better experience. Many apps insist on turning themselves into walled gardens that pretend other content and services do not exist. So we go back to the mobile web, with its own limitations.
This isn’t to say there aren’t a handful of apps we love with an ardour formerly reserved for children and spouses. Americans now spend more than three-and-a-half hours a day in apps, which is more time than we spend watching television and nearly twice as much time as the average parent spends taking care of children younger than six.
Eighty per cent of our time with apps is concentrated in our five favourites, though the specific apps vary from person to person. That’s both a testament to the addictiveness of connectivity and an indictment of apps that are not built for chat, social media or e-mail.
The good news is that this is tech, so pretty much everyone has an idea of how to disrupt apps.
Some of them might even work.
The first and most intriguing alternative to apps is chat. This is hard to understand for anyone who hasn’t spent time in Asia or at least read about the dominance of WeChat and its competitors, but in China chat apps are used for everything from hailing a car to paying for your Coke at a vending machine.
Kik, a chat app that doesn’t get as much attention as rivals but for US teens is on par with Facebook Messenger and Snapchat in terms of users and importance, will roll out similar functionality within six months, says CEO Ted Livingston.
A growing share of these commercial chats take place with so-called chat bots — interactive computer programs that prompt users to select from among several options, for example.
Imagine scanning a chat code on the back of the seat in front of you at a ballpark and having a brief conversation with a chat bot about how many and what kind of beers you want to order.
Chat, says Mr Livingston, could manage most of the real-world interactions that previously would have required us to visit a mobile Web page, download an app, or — in some cases — give up in frustration with a phone’s constraints.
Chat apps will not solve the walled-garden problem of apps, but they could at least create lightweight interactions with services that happen in seconds and don’t require us to spend time downloading or loading anything.
A TechCrunch article in January indicated that Facebook would soon unveil similar technology within its Messenger app.
At least at first, building chat bots that work on any chat app should be easier for developers, because they have similar interfaces. Chat, in other words, could become the new Web browser.
The race to become the "WeChat of the West" is in full swing, says Mr Livingston.
When the dust has settled, we’ll all be doing everything from asking for directions to making purchases through our chat apps of choice.
Another candidate for displacing apps is its predecessor: the mobile web.
Alex Komoroske, the lead product manager of the web platform team at Google, says that in the next six months consumers will see a "renaissance" in mobile web apps, driven by new technologies called "progressive web apps".
Google has every reason to want the mobile web to succeed, because the company’s revenue is so dependent on adverts generated from web searches.
And many of the technologies required for these web apps aren’t yet in Apple’s Safari browser — the default on the iPhone.
Progressive web apps look and behave like regular apps: They load quickly, take up the whole screen rather than appearing within a browser, have smooth animations, can be pinned to your home screen and even have push notifications.
But they’re built with web standards, so they can work with multiple browsers.
FlipKart, India’s leading indigenous e-commerce company, has built a progressive web app to save its data-conscious customers from having to download the company’s full Android app before beginning to shop.
That’s a lot of technology to digest, so let me sum up the future of interacting with our phones like this: You will spend less time in anything resembling a web browser, or perhaps none at all.
And as much as we text and chat with our friends, we’re probably going to spend even more time chatting with our phones themselves, as they take over even more of our time.
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Picture: THINKSTOCK
NEW YORK — Apps are broken. It is absurd that we have to discover, download and crowd our devices with apps we rarely if ever use.
For every iPhone sold, 119 apps have been downloaded, a number that has steadily crept up, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Yet we use fewer than a quarter of those apps in any given month.
The numbers are particularly discouraging for developers. The average app loses 77% of its users within three days after it’s downloaded. In the US, 30% of the time when an app is downloaded, a person never opens it more than twice.
We’ve all deleted apps to free space on our phones, or been appalled at mobile websites demanding we download their app for a better experience. Many apps insist on turning themselves into walled gardens that pretend other content and services do not exist. So we go back to the mobile web, with its own limitations.
This isn’t to say there aren’t a handful of apps we love with an ardour formerly reserved for children and spouses. Americans now spend more than three-and-a-half hours a day in apps, which is more time than we spend watching television and nearly twice as much time as the average parent spends taking care of children younger than six.
Eighty per cent of our time with apps is concentrated in our five favourites, though the specific apps vary from person to person. That’s both a testament to the addictiveness of connectivity and an indictment of apps that are not built for chat, social media or e-mail.
The good news is that this is tech, so pretty much everyone has an idea of how to disrupt apps.
Some of them might even work.
The first and most intriguing alternative to apps is chat. This is hard to understand for anyone who hasn’t spent time in Asia or at least read about the dominance of WeChat and its competitors, but in China chat apps are used for everything from hailing a car to paying for your Coke at a vending machine.
Kik, a chat app that doesn’t get as much attention as rivals but for US teens is on par with Facebook Messenger and Snapchat in terms of users and importance, will roll out similar functionality within six months, says CEO Ted Livingston.
A growing share of these commercial chats take place with so-called chat bots — interactive computer programs that prompt users to select from among several options, for example.
Imagine scanning a chat code on the back of the seat in front of you at a ballpark and having a brief conversation with a chat bot about how many and what kind of beers you want to order.
Chat, says Mr Livingston, could manage most of the real-world interactions that previously would have required us to visit a mobile Web page, download an app, or — in some cases — give up in frustration with a phone’s constraints.
Chat apps will not solve the walled-garden problem of apps, but they could at least create lightweight interactions with services that happen in seconds and don’t require us to spend time downloading or loading anything.
A TechCrunch article in January indicated that Facebook would soon unveil similar technology within its Messenger app.
At least at first, building chat bots that work on any chat app should be easier for developers, because they have similar interfaces. Chat, in other words, could become the new Web browser.
The race to become the "WeChat of the West" is in full swing, says Mr Livingston.
When the dust has settled, we’ll all be doing everything from asking for directions to making purchases through our chat apps of choice.
Another candidate for displacing apps is its predecessor: the mobile web.
Alex Komoroske, the lead product manager of the web platform team at Google, says that in the next six months consumers will see a "renaissance" in mobile web apps, driven by new technologies called "progressive web apps".
Google has every reason to want the mobile web to succeed, because the company’s revenue is so dependent on adverts generated from web searches.
And many of the technologies required for these web apps aren’t yet in Apple’s Safari browser — the default on the iPhone.
Progressive web apps look and behave like regular apps: They load quickly, take up the whole screen rather than appearing within a browser, have smooth animations, can be pinned to your home screen and even have push notifications.
But they’re built with web standards, so they can work with multiple browsers.
FlipKart, India’s leading indigenous e-commerce company, has built a progressive web app to save its data-conscious customers from having to download the company’s full Android app before beginning to shop.
That’s a lot of technology to digest, so let me sum up the future of interacting with our phones like this: You will spend less time in anything resembling a web browser, or perhaps none at all.
And as much as we text and chat with our friends, we’re probably going to spend even more time chatting with our phones themselves, as they take over even more of our time.
More Africa news from The Wall Street Journal
More news from The Wall Street Journal
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