Apps – Point Solutions for Everyone and Every Task
Through its consumer campaigns, Apple has cemented the idea that there’s an “app for that” and by “that”, I mean just about anything you could imagine.
This positioning is taking hold in business, government, religion and everyday lives of individuals across the globe as the popularity of iPhone, iPodTouch, and now iPad, has grown rapidly and pervasively since iPhone’s debut in mid-2007. Conceptually and literally, this positioning has also spilled over to non-Apple environments such as Android-based phones and devices. App stores are erupting for every viable smart-device platform and operating system.
Apps have become a meaningful abbreviation to technology that just works. Apps provide a common and easily understood idea that has been widely accepted as a solution – indeed a means to get stuff done quickly and effectively. Humans across the globe see apps as the pathway to achieving objectives, whether simple tasks or complex processes, and they’ve begun to vote on this model [literally] with gestures of resounding approval.
Good apps create and sustain long-lasting relationships with users and they find their way into prominent visibility on their mobile devices. Bad apps are quickly tossed aside as users exercise real-time [natural] selection for solutions that make life better. Apps are quickly becoming the life-link between users and businesses – they represent the brand equity of that relationship and users can assess the benefits of an app at relatively low costs.
Consumers are thrilled with the App Market Model.
App Market Model
The app market model emerged when Apple first released iPhone in 2007. Steve Jobs’ vision assumed that consumers and developers would benefit most from a powerful mobile web browser that pervasively supported open web standards. However, developers had different ideas; they wanted direct access to native elements of the device through an SDK (software development kit) and rightly so. Even today, Web standards and browser technology doesn’t mix all that well with native device and deep hardware features for many reasons including but not limited to security challenges. With the advent of iPhone (gen 1), developers desperately wanted the ability to create optimized apps that performed as well as Apple’s own pre-installed [native] apps.
Jobs agreed and went above and beyond the developer’s call for more device-level access. Apple provided programming access to iPhone and it’s wealth of hardware capabilities, but on one condition – all apps would be reviewed and distribution (and sale of apps) would have to go through iTunes – the App Store was born.
As global mobile industry analyst Ralf Gordon Jahns describes it in a recent report,
“The first six months in 2008, after the launch of the Apple App Store, proved to be an Eldorado for developers who quickly jumped on the band-wagon, realizing amazing downloads numbers for, generally speaking, very simple applications. In 2009 the market swelled with tens of thousands of new apps, making it more and more difficult for individual apps not to be lost in the long tail. Nonetheless the mass of developers adhere to IOS as their preferred mobile development and distribution platform.”
In 2010, the app market model is now at full throttle with likely many years of growth ahead.
Mobile vendors have joined the app market model without hesitation. But this success has little to do with Apple or its vision and everything to do with what customers and business users want – simple, focused, point solutions that just work. And apps need to work across two critical dimensions; the ability to purchase and install apps without friction, and fitness-of-purpose.
Why the Web May Soon Be Obsolete
When we think of the Web, we often think it is synonymous with the Internet. Here are two scenarios to consider that help to explain the difference.
In scenario “A”, all activities were all performed on the Web using a Web browser. This is a very familiar model but it should not to be confused with the Internet. Web site applications such as Weather.com and WebMD.com run in a bowser but utilize the Internet as the communication medium. The Internet [metaphorically] represents the pipes, and the content from these Web applications flow through the pipes to you.
It’s more accurate to think of your browser plus any given Web site as an “app” running on the Internet.
You spent the morning on the Internet but never actually used the Web in scenario “B”. The distinction is subtle but the comparative user experiences are not.
In scenario “B”, you were happily running mobile “apps” that help you get things done quickly and efficiently. The apps you chose for these tasks are very specific and tend to focus your activities with economy of interaction because they were designed for mobile use. In mobile computing paradigms, efficiency is key – user interfaces are simpler and more concise because they must be. This tends to yield a higher degree of productivity than broadly designed Web applications and most important – user satisfaction.
Aaron Levie sums it up nicely in this recent article, Building the Simple Enterprise.
Complexity is the culprit, and it takes many forms: tedious processes for common tasks like HR and expense reports, inability to collaborate beyond the firewall without IT intervention, and information silos without any security rationale. Not to mention the bad UI, error messages, upgrade failures, and downtime that users and IT departments contend with on a daily basis. And while no one explicitly desires cumbersome technology, we keep buying it because we’ve built a strong correlation between the number of features a solution has and the likelihood it will solve our problem.
For the most part, when it comes to life-tasks or business tasks, no user wants to spend more time tapping on frustratingly small interfaces and many will say they’d rather have a large screen where the viewing experience is superior and a comfortable forgiving keyboard with which to type. But here you are, steps from a desktop or laptop computer and still, you prefer to use your mobile device for many tasks. Why? Because app-centric systems simply offer a better approach to getting [certain] stuff done.
It’s safe to say that the verdict is in – apps require less typing, less time, and less user interaction. They are sleek and focused point solutions. While they were primarily designed for mobile use, you find them more appealing even in your office, your home, and at your desk.
The Coming App-centric Enterprise
There’s no doubt that the app market model will continue to provide new and innovative ways for businesses and large organizations to advance the science of computing. There will be some bad apps along the way, but the innovation cycle has been greatly shortened in this new model, making it more likely that companies can avoid massive IT failures.
At the heart of this emerging trend is the notion that apps are relevant only in a mobile context – when you’re away from the office. If you take a few minutes to observe your own behavior with mobile devices including the somewhat mobile iPad, you’ll discover that you’re actually [increasingly] using your iPad and smart phone at your desk. It’s obvious that you’re already depending on it while roaming through the building, in ad-hoc and casual meetings, at lunch (in the building) and certainly in conference rooms.
Apps are becoming increasingly important in non-mobile and quasi-mobile contexts. App-centricity in mobile and non-mobile contexts is already an important aspect of everyday business, and it’s about to flow back across your desktop and laptop.
Ross Rubin recently penned “Switched On: The iPadification of Mac OS” where he observed,
Apple’s new MacBook Air was cited as taking on traits associated with the iPad such as thinness, flash storage, longer battery life, and instant on. But it is the changes coming in Lion that are inspired by the iPad’s user interface that will have broader ramifications for the future of all Macs, even desktops.
The app-centric enterprise is just over the next hill … keep climbing.
Update – very relevant post (The Evolving Definition of “App”) from Daniel R Odio.
Bill, great post. I parlayed it into a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while now: http://www.danielodio.com/2010/11/09/the-evolving-definition-of-app/