The Future of Apps is Apps

According to the Yahoo's Flurry analytics, 90 percent of consumers’ mobile time is spent in apps, that’s why many e-commerce companies are switching towards mobile app development. However, some major problems with app ecosystem are not letting few companies to decide whether to develop mobile app or restrict themselves to mobile optimized sites.

But the perception held by some people that apps will/should be replaced by something entirely new doesn’t hold much ground. The future of apps is unarguably better and progressive web apps and embedded dumbed down app functionality inside chat apps.

Lets look at some of the app related issues.

Download and Install: When you get an inbound SMS, email or any link of the e-commerce site, you click the link, only to discover that you must first download and install the app, to view the content in the link. However, on WeChat or Facebook, you don’t have to install anything — the platform has pre-decided that this app is worthy of embedding.

But can iOS and Android make our app install process as seamless? What if “call a cab” can be set to “Uber” (default even)?The iOS and Android have to get better at turning our apps from icons to verbs.

Signup: Addition to the above mentioned painful procedure is sign up, which is too tactless on most apps. The app store could populate the app with the minimal information it needs to be functional, and thereby making the signup mostly irrelevant.

Rediscovery and Usage: After the install barricade, most apps are just forgotten and never re-used. But, what if our phone OS contextually suggested the right apps? When we take a picture, the 5 apps that store and edit photos, when we go to maps, the 4 apps that can call the cabs and so forth.

Organize: Many users have dozens of apps. The minimally used apps should become partly invisible —and the phone OS should surface the right apps contextually. There is a better way to organize these and make life better for users. If you move the apps to inside messaging, it's not going to solve this problem.

Integration: The embedded app inside your messaging app is in a way pre-integrated. But that’s only true for certain workflows. In a general sense, the mobile OS should be able to work with technology like Workato to connect apps with each other in meaningful ways.

The OS and the app stores of the two major ecosystems — iOS and Android — have a lot of gaps. However, this is not the only way to solve the problems with apps — we can’t wish them away — the apps have generated 10s of billions of dollars for developers and 100s of billions for the ecosystem. We can fix the gaps in apps so that they become seamless and easy to use.

The future of apps is indeed apps.