Independent Thinking Blog

Mobile Apps Are Taking Over the World

It’s a mobile apps world.

Twitter. Spotify. Slack. Pick your apps.

The Google Play Store has 1.6 million apps to choose from.

Recent research from Flurry Insights reveals that 90 percent of U.S. mobile Internet time is spent in apps. Some of this is the fact that Facebook bookends our day. It’s also that, more and more, we’re working from our phones. And playing on them too.

Here’s the breakdown.

Mobile Apps Use (% of total Internet time)

This data is really interesting. Substitute Twitter for Facebook, and it pretty nicely tracks with my own mobile apps usage.

But what does this mean for your business?

You don’t need a mobile app.

If I had a “Daria” app, would you immediately jump over to the Google Play Store or Apple App Store and download it?

I didn’t think so.

If you’re subscribed to this blog, you can already read the content via mobile in your email app or Feedly (or another RSS app). If not, just fire up that mobile browser and click away.

Still not convinced?

Have you ever purchased anything from Amazon via mobile? Did you download the app first?

Even the two percent of time allocated to news is (I suspect) largely attributable to Flipboard and similar aggregator apps–not to local news station apps.

It’s not about mobile apps.

I love the data on mobile apps. It’s really important to understand how we navigate online when we’re on our mobile devices.

Both what we do.

And what we don’t do.

Understand how your customers (or clients, members, prospects, and so forth) interact with you. Because chances are they don’t need your standalone app.

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