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Slashdot Asks: Is the App Boom Over? 278

Quartz did a story in 2014 in which, citing comScore's data, it noted that most smartphones users download zero apps per month. Two years later, the data from Nomura reveals that the top 15 app publishers saw downloads drop an average of 20% in the United States. While there are exceptions -- Uber and Snapchat continue to attract new users worldwide -- it appears that developers are finding it increasingly difficult to get new people to download and try their apps. Recode reports: But now even the very biggest app publishers are seeing their growth slow down or stop altogether. Most people have all the apps they want and/or need. They're not looking for new ones.What's your take on this?
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Slashdot Asks: Is the App Boom Over?

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @04:23PM (#52277439)

    That is a sad rehash of their website. I don't need access to a diluted version of your content SO BAD that I'm going to store an icon for it on my phone. Maybe if people started releasing apps that were AT LEAST as fully functional as their webpages (hopefully more) people would actually download them.

    • by pete6677 ( 681676 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @04:24PM (#52277443)

      And if the dumb hipster designers would quit dumbing down the UI, making it devoid of useful information.

      • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @04:54PM (#52277665)

        Amen !

        "Beautiful", "Apple like", "Clear and Simple" UI for newbies == Useless lack of functionality for regular users.

        • by fyngyrz ( 762201 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @05:51PM (#52277999) Homepage Journal

          Most apps are trash -- free to buy, but crippled and requiring more work to actually make work, tied into network cloud / validation, etc.

          If you want me to put it on my phone or tablet, here's what you need to do:

          1) write something useful
          2) charge me reasonably -- I'll pay up to $10 without flinching if it's actually useful. More if it's fabulous
          3) no nickle and diming. None. I buy it, it works. I'm not doing "in-app purchases" and that's bloody final
          4) no network ties for continued operation or validation or any such shit. I paid you, it should work, period
          5) no ads. No Ads. NO ADS. NO FUCKING ADS.
          6) Make sure you make both Android and iOS versions for games or chat or other device-to-device applications.
          7) interoperable - if it's a game, for instance, make SURE the iOS and Android versions interoperate.
          8) did I mention no ads? Because, FFS, no ads, please.
          9) If you think you need the "cloud", you should probably rethink that. Hard. Because the cloud sucks. If your app uses it, your app sucks.
          A) Is it too much to ask that your shite actually WORKS? (I know a lot of this is Apple and Google's fault.)

          More on #6: Carcassonne is a poster child for this. The Android version doesn't talk to the iOS version. So you want to play a game with someone, but you aren't using the same OS... can't do that. This happened, BTW, because the original game authors sold some part of the rights to a completely different company. Now they both have a crippled product. It's just data, you idiots.

          More on #A: I bought Fieldrunners for the iPad. Really like it, great game, grandkids like it too; so I bought it for my Galaxy S6. Money up front, yay. Right? No. Crashes on startup. Every. Fucking. Time. So this year, when I moved to the Galaxy S7, I thought, I'll try it again. Crashes on startup. Every. Fucking. Time.

          One reason I stopped buying apps for iOS is the stream of broken apps Apple leaves behind by constantly breaking the damned operating system. Probably a third of the apps I have on my iPad no longer work because iOS got API cancer. Again. And again. All kinds of stuff is broken. For instance, Plants vs. Zombies just crashes when I start it. Used to work fine. I hardly use my iPad any more because of apps that don't work.

          Another reason I stopped buying apps for iOS is the disappearance of apps from the store: Apple requires devs to pay a fee just to keep an app in the store, and at the same time, prevents sideloading. Reminds me of the mafia's business model. Repulsive. Makes me actually not LIKE to buy apps. My S6 lets me install apps from anywhere. Which means devs can maintain apps and keep them available without having their blood sucked constantly, regardless of sales level. Much better.

          Finally, sometimes I simply can't find anything. For instance, for my Galaxy S6 and now S7, I can't find an app to give me audio control; all I want is a decent EQ system, 10 bands or more, with some decent range. I have looked for this multiple times in the Play store and Amazon's app store and all I can find is the very worst kind of junkware, from being infested with ads to crashing to working then stopping. It seems that no one actually wants my money. Seems a shame, as I'd actually like to give it to someone.

          Bottom line for me is that it seems that in the rush to monetize the living shit out of everything, producing quality applications for a straightforward exchange of value is no longer what I typically find. The blame goes in many directions. But part of the solution is pretty easy. Stop writing shit apps, and you can have my money. I don't know how you can get Apple to behave, that seems like a lost cause to me (and we own a crapload of Apple hardware here, so that is in no way a smug observation), but under Android, the door is wide open to my wallet. I would LOVE to buy your app if you would just write a good one that does something useful or fun. I could buy a hundred apps today without impacting my budget in any way. And I'd LIKE to. For me, fo

          • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward

            > One reason I stopped buying apps for iOS is the stream of broken apps Apple leaves behind by constantly breaking the damned operating system.

            As a hobbyist programmer with a bunch of apps - every time Apple updates their OS I have to slog through whatever they broke this time and update all my apps. For someone with no time and who doesn't make much money off the apps this is a pain in the ass.

          • For every one of you (Score:5, Informative)

            by rsborg ( 111459 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @07:54PM (#52278641) Homepage

            2) charge me reasonably -- I'll pay up to $10 without flinching if it's actually useful. More if it's fabulous

            For every one of the "pay up front" customers, there's literally a dozen who will prefer to be nickeled and dimed. This probably goes double for games.

            • by Quirkz ( 1206400 )

              When considering this point, I can't help but think of Plants vs. Zombies.

              PvZ 1 was $10, if I recall. There might have been a small chance for some upsell, like extra consumable power-ups, but it was either almost entirely or entirely self-contained. You could get every plant, see every corner of the game, for that fixed price.

              PvZ2 is free, with lots of in-app purchases. The sum total of available purchases for unlockables (and I'm not talking about consumables here, but the buy-once plants, etc.) is well o

          • 3) no nickle and diming. None. I buy it, it works. I'm not doing "in-app purchases" and that's bloody final

            Unless it is a genuine way to make a product that you pay for what you use - similar to the different pricing tiers of modern IDE / OS / ... - but don't have to commit to a certain level at initial purchase.

            However if we go this way, it should be made very clear prior to purchasing:
            what is in the initial product,
            what is not,
            how much are the add ons

    • by Calydor ( 739835 )

      Essentially this.

      VERY few websites are so important they get a huge bookmark on my desktop. Not on my main computer, certainly not on a phone that is always starved for screen real estate.

      • by Barny ( 103770 )

        Indeed. Exceptions are made, of course, for XKCD.

        • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

          Problem with apps, whilst cool and novel, sometimes fun to use and serve some temporarily useful service, they all tend to clutter up the phone and make it more complex to use. Beyond the core apps, the rest, meh, download them, install them, rarely use them and every now and then clean up you phone by deleting them, going back to the core apps or just keeping apps that replace core apps that are not that good. Not having used an iPhone I don't know the value of their core apps but between Android and Goog

    • I've used apps that had decent UIs compared to the mobile version of the website, but the app still pulled all the data from the website. Then the site failed to update their app after redesigning their site, breaking the app entirely. Waited months for the app to get updated until deleting it entirely because I figured they were never going to fix it.

      Unless there's some significant need for local processing power, I'd prefer sites spend their resources on a decent website. I'm tired of apps as half-assed g

  • Permissions (Score:5, Insightful)

    by XXeR ( 447912 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @04:26PM (#52277459)

    I'd be far more willing to install new apps if the permissions weren't so incredibly invasive.

    • Re:Permissions (Score:4, Insightful)

      by NormalVisual ( 565491 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @04:30PM (#52277505)
      This. So many apps are asking for really inappropriate permissions, and I just don't have the time or motivation to deal with it.
    • Re:Permissions (Score:5, Interesting)

      by scorp1us ( 235526 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @04:36PM (#52277545) Journal

      They are fixing this. Older apps have monolithic permissions, but in the latest OSs, you can tune them. Android is copying apple in that you can now ask for a permission at runtime and the user can disable it later.

      • Re:Permissions (Score:5, Interesting)

        by jmv ( 93421 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @06:09PM (#52278119) Homepage

        What is still missing is just "faking" permissions, i.e. you have permission to open my contacts, but I have none... or my camera is just filming in the dark. Cyanogenmod had that, but I'm not sure why Google hasn't decided to use it.

        • What is still missing is just "faking" permissions,... but I'm not sure why Google hasn't decided to use it.

          Really?
          Google?
          The company that makes its money off of selling the consumer information (or at least using it for targeted advertising). You don't see why they would not want to build a feature that it makes it harder for them to harvest data?

          Sorry if this sounds snarky but I am genuinely shocked.

        • by Merk42 ( 1906718 )

          What is still missing is just "faking" permissions, i.e. you have permission to open my contacts, but I have none... or my camera is just filming in the dark. Cyanogenmod had that, but I'm not sure why Google hasn't decided to use it.

          What exactly would you expect the app to do with "fake" "empty" contacts vs just saying it can't access them? In the end you can't use whatever feature it's offering, so why add complexity?

    • I'd be far more willing to install new apps if the permissions weren't so incredibly invasive.

      Speaking from an IOS viewpoint, I'd be far more willing to install new apps if managing them wasn't so incredibly painful.

      Apps on my phone are like search engine results -- if it isn't on the first screen, I rarely see them.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Get an iphone. All permissions are off by default and are only enabled at the time of request. You can grant or revoke permissions at any time.

      Like that fucking facebook app. No, I will not let you have my fucking phone contacts. Ever. Stop asking.

    • Almost every app is spyware of some sort. Even a lot of the "good" ones are this way
  • by The-Ixian ( 168184 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @04:26PM (#52277461)

    This is your story dude!

    Apps are for luddites, etc, etc

  • Too crowded (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    There is too much junk in the app world. I personally don't want to sort through all of it. I have the apps I know I need/want and never search for new apps without a recommendation from a friend.

    My most recent app download was Microsoft office lens, I had no idea I needed it until I took a picture of a whiteboard and my coworker told me to use office lens instead.

    Basically I don't know I need any new apps so you have to advertise it well or it has to be recommended by a friend.

  • by AbRASiON ( 589899 ) * on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @04:31PM (#52277509) Journal

    " Most people have all the apps they want and/or need. They're not looking for new ones."

    Not much more to say. Galaxy Note 2, only 2GB of ram and 2012 tech, runs totally fine, quite happy with it, considering I paid $100 a year ago for it used... but I don't see the need to get a heap of pointless apps. I probably regularly use no more than 10, including the ones that come on the phone.

  • Micropayments (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bender Unit 22 ( 216955 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @04:36PM (#52277547) Journal

    I know everybody just LOVES it and I am alone on this. But micro payments / in app purchases killed the games for me. I don't mind paying for the games and I used to buy new ones every month. But I haven't spent money in any "app store" in over 2 years now.

    • But micro payments / in app purchases killed the games for me.

      I love those games. I play them for FREE all the time, as I don't make any in-app purchases. If the game becomes impossible to finish or deliberately corrupts the saved game file, I'll move on to another game.

      • by Calydor ( 739835 )

        It's really a bit like playing a game on hard mode. Fewer lives, rarer continues, harder levels - it gives a certain satisfaction to make it through level after level without paying anything.

    • Same for me...micro payments totally turned me off mobile games, I pretty much have none on my phone now despite regularly purchasing games in the past. I don't mind buying comes ... Hate the constant upsell...
  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @04:36PM (#52277551)

    A lot of users nowadays consider apps as spyware and rightfully so !
    And even when I am seriously interested in some app but, say a tasklist manager, wants access to my photo's, contacts, call list, sms, and what not I just don't install it.
    Has advertisements in it ? No thanks.
    I am using a few apps, like 5 or 6, that really bring something usefull for me and I don't mind paying for them as long as they don't have adds and use me as the product

  • by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @04:38PM (#52277563) Homepage Journal

    I can deliver a wonderful interactive user experience with HTML5, especially because of the Web Audio/Video interface which makes the microphone and camera available to a Javascript program, the HTML5 2D canvas (I've not done anything with HTML5 3D canvas yet) and Websockets for a session-based connection. The Javascript language and the web APIs are kludges built on top of kludges, but they are well-optimized and they work across three widely-available browsers.

    That is, except on iOS because Apple insists that web browsers use their handicapped rendering engine instead of the browser's native one. Apple needs to catch up. Right now, I just don't support them. You need to run Chrome, Firefox, or Opera with their full rendering engine, not Apple's handicapped one. This even works on Mac, just not iOS.

    • by nadass ( 3963991 )
      Yes.

      Most seem to forget that technology like smartphone apps are temporary boxed-in containers intended to bring missing platform functionality. For example, when navigation features became built-in to the platforms, then their third-party app equivalents became redundant -- or had to scale up to justify its competitive value. Same goes for media players, etc.

      Similarly, as the underlying platforms (hardware and software alike) evolved to provide improved UX via other containers [mobile browsers] the
      • And it seems that a lot of apps just run an embedded browser. More than once an app has shown me a 404 page, etc.
    • by vadim_t ( 324782 )

      Sure, if you have bandwidth to spare, don't mind never owning any of your apps, and are fine with completely being at the mercy of the publisher.

      I highly prefer apps because I retain some measure of control. It wants to poke around where it shouldn't now? Well, I don't have to install the update. It gets discontinued? I still have it locally and have time to look for a replacement.

      • Well, I do own my apps, I'm the copyright holder. And there are APIs to install HTML5 programs on your phone/tablet/etc. Do you mean owning apps that you've paid for? Sorry, you don't own them, You have a license.

        In general, not installing the update doesn't work. If it uses a remote server at all, that server knows what version you are using, and can disallow old ones.

      • by narcc ( 412956 )

        That's hasn't been true for a while. Packaged web apps are essentially identical to other apps, negating your concerns entirely, but that's not what you have in mind. For those, standards like application cache and other offline features are quickly making differentiating between web apps and 'native' apps meaningless. It takes very little effort to make a web app function completely offline. (The benefits to the developer/distributors are obvious.) Download it once, and it's stored locally in perpetuit

    • by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @06:23PM (#52278169) Journal

      HTML5 and its APIs make apps obsolete

      They say that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

      So far every major phone platform has gone through this cycle. First: native apps are obsolete! Then it turns out that no actually they aren't obsolete because nothing has the performance of C++. Then they allow native apps.

      I can deliver a wonderful interactive user experience with HTML5

      Depends on the experience. Some you can, but it simply doesn't have the performance for others.

      but they are well-optimized and they work across three widely-available browsers.

      No they ain't. If you don't believe me, go and grab an old PC (say an eee 900) and try web apps versus real native code. The web apps, like google docs, you tube and so on are hilariously bad, basically unusable now compared to say libreoffice which is still snappy and any native video player which can happily play 720p video, compared to a browser which can barely manage 320p now.

      Fortunately new machines are much faster, but the performance gap still exists and is the same magnitude.

      • I didn't volunteer to support the VAX-780 :-) . The gap between native code and web code will further narrow as webassembly develops. There's no reason not to compile that to native code.

        • Yeah, but my point is you can see the very stark performance difference on that machine. It's harder to see the difference on an i7 for a word processor. Nonetheless, google docs for example is probably an order of magnitude slower while having far fewer features.

          WASM will close the gap to some extent on raw number crunching code. However for anything output related the stuff has to go to the screen via the browser which is not exactly efficient. Case in point: browsers have their video decoders in compiled

    • Stop trying to get your getting your spyware laden crap onto my computer.

      All I want is a plain ol' HTML4 browser. Blocking JS, blocking ads. Not a PDF-like view o the world where everyone rewrites a shittier version of a rendering engine in a Canvas to avoid ad-blockers. Not one where you can theoretically pull data from the canvas with unique identifiers, because some asshole wants to write an application in a webpage- which should be passive.

      What's wrong with separating data from code with pages and ap

      • Keeping spyware-laden crap off of your machine is a laudable goal. But I fail to understand how native apps, rather than HTML5 ones, help rather than hinder your security. They're not generally source-available, and you don't get the browser's capabilities to control and inspect them. What am I missing?

        • What am I missing?

          I would say the difference is quantity and trust. I load orders of magnitude more websites than I do apps. I also load them from sketchier sources. (Relative to apps. I do still exercise discretion.)

          The safer it is so load a website (for instance, if it's all text with some formatting) the easier it is for me to load disparate sites. That allows far more discovery of information.

          But, to sum up, basically the difference is I opt into downloading an app. HTML5 turns every webpage into

          • There is a HTML5 API for persistent local storage, at least 5 MB, so you might as well consider it a drive-by installer.

            Short of BLIT [wikipedia.org] happening, the world isn't going to provide you with the sanitary web we used to have. What you and other Open Source folks can do is work toward really good sandboxing. Constantly.

            I sympathize. I pine for the world where we didn't have to encrypt every page.

  • by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @04:39PM (#52277575)
    From time to time I look into the list of new apps available on f-droid.org, but it's a long time ago I saw something new I really wanted to have. And certainly, I will not register an account with Google or use any commercial app store.
  • by Maxo-Texas ( 864189 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @04:52PM (#52277647)

    The excess permissions are an issue.

    But the real road block is larger apps that require the limited phone memory and which won't / can't use the SD card.

    I've had 29 gigabytes of free memory and apps that couldn't update or install due to lack of space.

    • If you are using Android 6.0, you can use your SD card as an expansion of your internal memory. In my GF Moto G2 (which has only 8GB internal memory and less than 5 free) I put a 32GB UHS-1 card, go into storage/whatever, click "use it as internal storage", it formats the card and tada! she has a "40GB" phone and can move audio/video and apps on the SD card easily.
  • by brian.stinar ( 1104135 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @04:54PM (#52277663) Homepage

    This xkcd [xkcd.com] states it pretty well.

    I own a software company. Every week someone talks with me about the app they want built. Almost always, they do not actually need any functionality that is missing from HTML5. Very occasionally they do (such as these guys [epactechnologies.com].)

    Why would anyone install an app which does not offer anything above the web site? They wouldn't. Clients pay tremendous amounts of money to build apps, which have not been designed, tested, or thought about in any kind of a meaningful way. Even when those clients have money, most of the time I stay away, since being a part of something dumb isn't that great (even if you're getting paid.) Or I try and help them think about it, and then build them a webpage, if they have money.

    • Why would anyone install an app which does not offer anything above the web site?

      Convenience. Let me give you an example. There's a site I have bookmarked on both my desktop and my laptop that tells me the best gas prices near where I live. If I'm on the road, I can tell the site where I am and it will get me the best local prices, but I have to do that every time I need it, and I can't use it in the car. I also have their mobile app on my phone. If I'm low on gas, I can pull over, bring the app up
      • That is a good example, up to a certain point. Eventually, you'll get clogged up with tons of apps you want to install for convenience, exactly the same way that browser shortcuts eventually need to be organized.

        Will that mobile page not pull GPS? GPS is supported in HTML5. [w3schools.com] If it does, you could pin that to your home screen (using Chrome, with a shortcut) to accomplish the same thing. [howtogeek.com] If you don't want to have their app installed...

        I still see your point though. Pinning a URL might be more complicated than

        • If you go to their website, you still have to go to the right city. This may involve getting to the right county first (I live in Ventura County in California but I often need this in Los Angeles, or Orange County.) or even the right state, depending on how far you're going. With the mobile app, you bring it up, tell it to find gas prices for you and get a list of what's local, with prices. Much faster, much easier and no worries about getting wrong info because of a typo.
          • Then that's just a case of bad web design.
          • Yeah, like the other dude said, that is bad design. There is no reason that the webpage would have to function differently than the app now - webpages can get GPS coordinates from a GPS chip, just as an app can get GPS coordinates from a GPS chip.

            • That's not going to work very well unless the computer has a GPS chip, and neither my desktop nor my laptop has one.
              • by brian.stinar ( 1104135 ) on Thursday June 09, 2016 @12:08AM (#52279487) Homepage

                There's something called a media query, which allows you to style your site differently based on the screen resolution. This concept is how sites are (easily) responsive to different size screens. Additionally, developers SHOULD check to see if the browser + hardware supports the call being made, before calling it. For GPS, that would be to use the GPS coordinates, only if GPS exists. Otherwise, make them fill out a form.

                That would be a well designed, responsive, website. There is no technical reason that would be impossible. It would be cheaper to build that than to build a website, and an Android app, and an iOS app.

  • Here's a definitely non-comprehensive list of issues I see in mobile app ecosystem for $provider:

    1. App copycats. There's a gazillion "flappy bird" knock-offs, to the point where the customer says "screw them all".
    2. Horrid permission requirements. Granted, most people don't even give a fuck, but those who do slowly teach others, I guess it started to pay off.
    3. Phone bloatware: it generates a certain repulsion towards downloading and installing more apps since day one.
    4. Retarded ad system for apps. There

    • Re:App issues (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Daetrin ( 576516 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @06:20PM (#52278159)
      Since you've made a list, i'll add to it:

      6: Fear of malicious apps: As with #2 a lot of people don't give a fuck, but as more and more stories come out about malicious apps slipping past the security of the official stores more and more people will be wary of downloading an app they're not sure they can trust.
      7: Lack of space: Many phones have limited space and don't allow you to use an SD card. On my Android phone when i dip below 500 MB of free space it won't let me install anything new, or even update an existing app. So i can either find some music or photos i want to delete or an old app i want to uninstall or just say screw it, i didn't want that new app that badly anyway.

      And finally, N: The original premise, most people already have all the apps they really need: This by itself might not kill app downloads, but when you combine it with all the other issues listed above it provides a strong incentive to just not bother.
  • Apps will still be important, and undoubtedly there will be some that become popular and some that will be economically important for either their users or their developers or both. But the novelty of an app for the sake of having an app has ended.

  • A decent personal music player, too, and enough control over it to secure the phone from being hacked. Stereo bluetooth. User-replaceable battery. A slot for a microSD card. Wifi access to the internet that I can be sure only ever uses wifi and never the cellphone network, so I don't need a dataplan. That's about what I want out of a phone.
  • by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot&worf,net> on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @05:05PM (#52277745)

    "Most" smartphone users run Android. Mostly because "most" smartphones out there are Android. Been that way for a long time - Android's outsold iOS 4:1 or so for a few years now. So I wouldn't be surprised that "most" smartphone users download zero apps - they got a smartphone because that's pretty much what is available.

    So I'd guess most smartphone users don't bother with apps not because they are scared of permissions or whatever, but because they don't care - their smartphone already came laden with the apps they care about - Facebook, Pandora, Spotify, etc. They don't know, nor care about anything else. They got a smartphone, and damned if they were going to pay more than $0 for it.

    Of course, that excludes a certain other mobile OS where developers do make money. Granted,t he gold rush is over, and there's tons of crap, but whose users do keep getting apps and all that. Of course, since they are a tiny minority of smartphone users (under 20%), well, they don't count.

    Then of course, Android app users generally don't pay for apps as a whole so if a developer wants to eat, ads are pretty much the only way.

  • Introducing my new app, App Boom Over. App Boom over is an app available on Android and iOS that informs you about new useless apps that are available to download. Never stop downloading new useless apps you don't need with App Boom Over. Set App Boom Over to automatic, and App Boom Over finds new useless apps for information you don't need and could easily obtain by typing into the browser such as the temperature outside, the day of the week, time, how many apps you've downloaded, and...
  • Yes, the hype is over, save for perhaps the occasional "viral" game. What we see today is nothing more than users wanting or needing extensions to their favorite websites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), which is rather expected given people's attraction to live and breathe the web through their smartphone. It's also a rather finite list, validating the theory here that app usage has fallen dramatically.

    What I don't get is the attraction to using a smartphone for seemingly everything these days. It's really we

  • by gilgongo ( 57446 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @05:54PM (#52278021) Homepage Journal

    I'm a UI designer, and I find it amazing that almost very business I've worked for is happy to fling huge amounts of cash at creating native apps without even wanting to answer the obvious question their customers will ask: "Why should I download this?"

    So far in pretty extensive customer research, the best that anyone can come up with is an offline condition (eg MailOnline's news app allows you to download news and read it 1995 style), speed (they think it's somehow faster) and a kind of ragged notion of better aesthetics. After that it's a grab bag of slightly better maps integration, the convenience of a shortcut on the desktop, and (for the business) avoiding the Google tax that your web app will have to pay if you want to sell anything online. Statistically, it's also known that some apps (mainly news ones) will get huge usage from a tiny (and usually numerically static) fanbase.

    But that's about it.

    It's all so weird. So wasteful and strange - but I'll design 'em if they want 'em (I've given up pushing back).

    • by Lennie ( 16154 )

      It's kind of funny, it's a bit like websites many, many years ago. Every business is like: we want a website. What do you want to put on the website ? What is your audience ? What would you like to communicate ? Euh... I don't know. LoL.

      You already mentioned it, but I think it goes deeper: a place on the home screen. Which is limited real estate. Something a browser bookmark to home screen could do too, which was harder to do in older browsers but more and more people are finding it now it has become easier

  • 1. Good enough: devices come with the best versions of most everything you need. An Android device comes with Google maps, Google drive, Google Inbox, Google Calendar, Google Chrome, Google music etc. You don't *need* anything else.

    2. Saturation: There are so many apps for every purpose it's hard to know what to install. The novelty is gone. In the early days I used to just page through new apps to see what people had done. Now everything is done 10x and I've seen it before in one form or another.

  • by Dorianny ( 1847922 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @06:01PM (#52278055) Journal
    It is hard, especially in developed countries, to even find non-smartphones in stores. Even people that have 0 interest in any of the "smart" features such as the expandability via apps. are by in large forced into the smartphone market
  • I predict an uptick in clean apps that provide functionality people need. Likely leveraging or completely open source.

    I tried to get some programs for my work-issued Blackberry and was shocked by the garbage.

    I also predict an uptick in third-party collections of apps and reviews; there's lots of analogs to what happened with shareware back in the olden days.

    • At least on Apple getting something in the Store used to be a pain if it was free/open - IIRC VLC went through a lot of hassle to do it.

      And at least with some Android distributions you can use 3rd party stores or no store at all

  • We at at a more mature stage of the app store, where people may not go looking for apps much - but they still LIKE to download them, if they know the app exists.

    So now we are at the stage where marketing really matters. People will not just find your app, they must learn it exists somehow and then they will go get it.

    That also means the first launch experience better be pretty damn awesome, or else they'll just open the app , hate it, and dump it.

  • most smartphones users download zero apps per month
    Wow. Am I somehow expected to "download apps"?

    What would I do with them? Probably App developers or sales companies don't produce Apps that users want/need?

    When I suddenly have a new interest, I look for Apps. That might be once a year, or 5 times a year.

    But I'm not browsing the App-Stores for new Apps, I rather browse the Books-Stores ...

  • by nine-times ( 778537 ) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @07:07PM (#52278417) Homepage

    My personal opinion is that application developers are generally misguided and developing stupid applications. I make a point to occasionally look around at what apps are available on different platforms, and with all the glut of apps, they're generally not aimed at solving problems that need to be solved. There's always another runner game, or someone trying to make the next Angry Birds. For some reason, there have been a lot of new mail clients for OSX/iOS recently. There are a bunch of task/todo list apps that don't offer distinct features. Every once in a while, you'll see a bunch of apps released that seem to be taking aim at a particularly successful app-- Slack, WhatsApp, Instagram, whatever.

    So you take an existing app, rehash it with some gimmick, and hope to sell that for millions of dollars. Sometimes the existing app is actually useful (e.g. email), but often enough the app is silly and gimmicky to begin with (e.g. Flappy Bird). But in any case, the app doesn't add any value, and doesn't solve the problems with the existing app. And then a month later, some other developer has a newer more gimmicky app that also doesn't solve any problems with the original app. Or maybe it does solve some problems, but creates new ones.

    Now, there's a very good argument against my complaints: Even though I'm saying these apps are silly and useless, they seem to be what people want. The reason there are so many Flappy Bird clones is because so many people are buying them. However, if the problem now is that people aren't buying the apps, then I have a new counter-argument to that: No, people aren't buying them.

    It all just makes me sad because I work in IT, and I see problems every day that need to be solved. There's so much work that needs to be done, and all our money and development talent is going towards trying to make the next Snapchat.

  • My phone updates 12-20 apps a day. That's more than enough to keep up with.

  • Apps merely went along for the ride when the smartphone market exploded.

    They were new, everyone just HAD to have one and the apps followed in their footsteps.

    Now that smartphones are ho-hum, so are the apps. I really don't care what the next generation of Android or IOS will be.

    I'm likely going to switch back to a dumb phone next time around. It will make calls and do basic texting and that's it. When I even bother to turn it on, that is.

    I am done with the $600 advertising and surveillance platform that

  • It's now about AI-voice type stuff, like Amazon Skills [amazon.com].

    Instead of apps, we're now building skills, tasks, context aware software that usually has a voice or touch interface.

  • I have a good-sized set of apps that make use of the capabilities of my phone and tablet. As those capabilities increase, I add apps that use the added features AND which I find useful. Coming soon: it will be interesting to see what that two-lens camera can do.

  • I've got better things to do with my life than fight with Android's broken permission system.

    Need my phone state? Fuck off.

    Need my address book? Fuck off.

    Need my location and you're not showing a map? Fuck off.

    There, I just told 90% of the reason to own a smart phone to kindly fuck off.

    Welcome to my new dumb phone with the touch screen that constantly ass dials, because there's no proper switch on the dumb thing to lock this out.

    You'd think that was enough, but then I realized the audio quality is less t

  • by Impy the Impiuos Imp ( 442658 ) on Thursday June 09, 2016 @01:17AM (#52279653) Journal

    Most apps are like shifty browsers where you can't zoom in.

  • Yeah, it certainly can't be that most new smartphone buyers actually replace their ageing dumb- or feature phone and uses it just like the old one. IOW without "apps"
  • by DivineKnight ( 3763507 ) on Thursday June 09, 2016 @03:41AM (#52279989)

    And it has nothing to do with the lack of storage space on currently shipping, top of the line devices...such as Samsung's Galaxy S7, whose makes think that USAsians only really need 32GB of on board storage space, and Europeans / other parties might want just a tiny bit more in the form of 64GB of storage. True, you can use a MicroSD card to increase storage, but it's not Android storage...unless you use a hack / enable that special feature, at which point, you lose the ability to transfer files to and from the phone the MicroSD slot (as the slot / card is now 'welded' together, so far as Android is concerned). As a bonus, on this particular model, it's dual SIM, or SIM + microSD...so, still juggling stuff if you go abroad.

    We have 10TB HDs, 2TB SSDs, 200 GB microSDs...and the equivalent of 640KB or 8GB of RAM as storage space as the shipping standard for Android devices. "No one is downloading any more apps!" -> "Plants vs. Zombies 2 eats like 1 GB of storage space on my phone!"

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