Mobile Apps and Trends

What are Mobile Apps?

Mobile Apps are software programs that are designed to work on tablets and smartphones. There are many different categories of Mobile Apps, such as Entertainment, Games, Health & Fitness, News, and Sports, just to name a few categories. Throughout the years Mobile Apps have changed and that is in large part because of how their consumers have changed.

How have Consumer Habits Changed?

With all the new ways there are to access digital applications you might expect what people use to access these applications to be pretty diverse. Studies show however, that there are two main ways consumers access the internet and applications are through:

• Desktop Computers

• Mobile Devices

“According to the 2017 Mary Meeker report, the number of hours spent on the internet is still increasing each year, but the split between desktop and mobile is becoming more and more pronounced.” (Mindsea). With the increase in mobile users, application downloads have increased drastically.

Application downloads in Billions (Mindsea)

How These Applications Make Money

Most of the applications on a users mobile phone are free applications, so some may ask, “How do they make money?”. “If you charge for downloads initially, fewer users will download the app. That’s because the majority of people are used to being offered free downloads.” (Blair). While the number of free downloads dominates the number of paid downloads, the free applications can still be profitable. A few ways these applications make money are through:

• Advertisements

• In-App Purchases

Application Downloads in Billions (Blair)

One reason why these free applications are the most downloaded is because of how they market themselves. The application advertisers do a great job of analyzing the decision-making process (Nahai) when marketing their product. The advertisers look at things such as gender, age, and location in order to guide the user in the direction of an application that is most helpful, or if the consumer is looking for a new game they can suggest games the user may enjoy.

Applications are evolving, below is a short video explaining the evolution of applications!

As technology grows and evolves, so does the way in which we work and do business. Thanks to the internet of things, everything is a mobile platform, which makes apps more relevant than ever before. But, as a category that reinvents itself every five years, no app is relevant for long.

By: Devon Gabauer


References

“25 Mobile App Usage Statistics To Know In 2019.” MindSea Development, 26 Nov. 2018, mindsea.com/app-stats/.

“Mobile App Download and Usage Statistics (2019).” BuildFire, 19 Feb. 2019, buildfire.com/app-statistics/.

Nahai, Nathalie. Webs of Influence: the Psychology of Online Persuasion. Pearson Education Limited, 2017.