The sentiment expressed in this trusty old adage seems to sum up nicely the current yardstick for success in the mobile applications market.  It was only last November when Apple announced that over 100,000 apps were available in their burgeoning App store, clearly an impressive number.  However, barely three months have passed and now the fact that the total has risen to over 140,000 is being widely trumpeted.  Amongst all the ballyhoo accompanying the launch of the new iPad, I gather that another 40,000 apps have been added since November and the total continues to grow unabated. To quote another old adage, the subtext seems to be “never mind the quality, feel the width” and this strikes me as both rather odd and in danger of missing the point.

The conclusion that we are expected to reach appears to be simply “the more apps the better”.  Please don’t get me wrong – choice is clearly a good thing, and I’m sure that there are some excellent applications amongst the 40,000 new entrants but am I alone in feeling that there should be other metrics for success rather than just sheer volume of numbers?  Let’s be honest, I doubt that the majority of even the most ardent iPhone app fans have seen (let alone downloaded) more than a handful of apps so the fact that the total continues to grow to such stratospheric levels seems somewhat irrelevant.  Furthermore, it’s not just Apple’s App store that is exhibiting this trend.  Although it’s a long way behind, the Android Market is also growing at a breathtaking pace, recently doubling from 10,000 to 20,000 apps in just over 5 months.

To put all these numbers into perspective, I recently attended a conference on the future of app stores and it quickly became apparent that applications which are not in the top 1% are unlikely to ever be seen or downloaded.  This situation is made worse by the fact that very popular apps inevitably feature in everyone’s “Top-10 list” and the snowball effect ensures that they attract ever more attention and hence more downloads whilst little known, unpopular apps remain doomed to obscurity.  Furthermore, despite the huge numbers of downloads that are frequently reported in the press very few of these translate into long-term users (i.e. less that 10% after 10 days dropping to less that 1% after 90 days.)   So where does this leave us and is the mobile application phenomenon more hype than reality?

In my humble opinion, the mobile application space is an exciting new area of technology that promises enormous potential for both individuals and businesses over the next few years.  However, I believe that it is still in it’s infancy and is only now just entering its second phase of development.  I would argue that the first phase was driven primarily by the rapid uptake of games, social networking tools and what I would categorise as “personal” applications and utilities.  (The majority of the apps mentioned above clearly fall into this category.)  Things are now starting to change and we are beginning to see the emergence of mobile applications for business.  Areas such as mobile banking, insurance and remote PC access are now spawning new applications that support people in their day-to-day business activities but even these fall well short of the potential that exists.

I believe that the exciting growth area will be for mobile applications (both downloadable Smartphone apps and cloud-based applications) that mobilise core business systems, thereby enabling organisations to offer improved customer service, more channels of communication, a richer customer experience and potentially new sources of revenue.  Examples are likely to include business information systems (e.g. access to financial data, analytics, reports etc.), field sales/support applications (e.g. mobile interaction for field-based employees with sales, job-scheduling & customer support systems etc.) and highly sophisticated mobile portals which deliver pertinent, timely information and exclusive offers for mobile users.  The key factor that will distinguish this next generation of mobile applications will not be how many of them there are but rather the value that they can deliver.  Hopefully we can start to measure the success of mobile applications by their quality rather than by their multiplicity!

Peter Skinner – February 2010