Long term commitments on mobile
If I hear about a great new app, I immediately download it to check it out. This leads to two outcomes: discovery of a great app that I will continue to use for a long period of time that slowly creeps closer to my home screen or an orphaned app that was opened one time and then filed out of the way until I need more space and delete it.
According to Fortune Tech, I’m not alone.
“The rate at which web users consume and discard new apps is accelerating. Proof of that is clear: Chatroulette was popular for around nine months before users lost interest in its often-lewd content. Turntable.fm, which exploded in the summer of 2011, peaked that fall before people tired of its novelty interface. It was popular for long enough to raise $7 million in venture funding before finally shutting down late last year. Draw Something, a game which took off in early 2012, climbed the App Store rankings for just six weeks before Zynga (ZNGA) acquired its parent company, OMGPop, for $200 million. Almost immediately after the deal, the app began losing users. Recent viral hits which the jury is still out on include Snapchat, Vine, and Frontback, a photo-sharing app which gained traction over the summer but has been quiet since. The moral is: The majority of viral apps and companies have ended up as losers."
On my desktop it’s very different. I can save applications or files in what seems like infinite space, so there is less need to discard things often.
Phone capacity has a different constraint than the web never had. Not only from the development standpoint of the libraries you can ship into app stores for approval, but for the storage footprint on the phone. I’ve take advantage of Dropbox’s mobile sync features for photos but I still feel like space is precious on my phone more so than on my laptop.
I’ve never been a fan of iCloud, perhaps because of my existing membership to Dropbox or early sour experience with ‘sync’ through iTunes, but that’s the supposed promise. Endless space, but the price can get hefty to hang onto useless data if you’re paying per GB per month.
If iCloud were free and unlimited, what would change? What would you have on your phone if space weren’t a constraint?
When I visited Budapest and Berlin I had two data heavy apps that kept data cached locally. It worked great while on the move but was dumped when I got back to make room for new apps with unknown utility.
With the web, we were always restricted on speed of information but not limited in which webpages we could visit based on their data needs to run properly. Data was free as long as you had a connection.
With mobile, data hoarding is taxed. If you want to visit 100 different apps, that all need to be downloaded locally for performance, you either need to pay up or narrow down your choices. Only the best apps last, but what makes an app worth keeping?
There will always be space in my phone for utilities: Mail, Kik messenger, DuckDuckGo, Duolingo, Meetup, Sonos. The places I go to transact on a regular basis.
With entertainment apps, I think I’ve been more fickle. Most entertainment apps expect you to put time, content and energy into them but give nothing back. You don’t gain anything from using them. All of the drawings in DrawQuest go there to disappear. Snapchat too. Twitter updates are quickly swept away in the feed. It’s sizzle then burn. Some of these apps were built to avoid the data storage tax, to keep their footprints small on purpose. It’s a feature, not a bug, but how long can they really stick around if they don’t create any lasting value over time?
I could feed DrawQuest, SnapChat and 2048 for 6 months straight and have nothing to look back on. Nothing to show for the time spent. Just an app that looks exactly the same as the first day I downloaded it. So switching costs to a new entertainment app are easier.
If more apps were built to progress you over time, maybe their life as a top app wouldn’t fade so quickly. Even CandyCrush had lasting impact because you lose all forward progress if you delete the app. It may be challenging for a UGC app to build that progress over time when it would require more data on the users phone. Those committed would have to give up storage from something else to get there.
How different would the app ecosystem look if phones had 1TB drives and apps could ship up to 1GB of data? Would apps still go viral and fade? Would we hoard more? Or would we just wait longer for our apps to download?
[Props: Article originally found via Timoni who speaks to the impact young users have on driving popularity but not sticking around. Then commented on by Rickwebb who takes a look at the parallels of Hollywood’s Studio model to Facebook’s app constellations.]