The Rise and Fall of the Mobile App
by Tim Butler | Last Updated: Oct 26, 2016
"There's an app for that"….but is there really?
The novelty wear-off was just the beginning. Alas, as I kept using my good ‘ol iPhone 4, I found myself constantly deleting other items on my phone in order to make room for a new app. The cycle continued, and it felt like an endless loop of that new Google commercial. After one too many rounds of find an app, delete an app, repeat, I found myself going straight to my internet browser and just using the search bar. Nowadays, I realize that many of those times I was in "the now" and just needed information to help me at that specific moment, I no longer needed the “there’s an app for that” experience that the app market had built itself on at the dawn of the smartphone era. In my moment of need, I didn’t have time to wait for the download. I didn’t want to use the last of that iTunes gift card I got for Christmas to pay for it. I didn’t want to give up one of my apps just to make room for another. It was official: apps had warmed out their welcome on my phone. As an engineer, I began to question: Do others have app fatigue or is it just me?Do we have "App Fatigue"?
This was a question I began asking myself. I wanted to find out if others were feeling the same way, so I did my research and found that there is definitely a change going on in the world of mobile, particularly with the usage of apps versus mobile focused web content. Over the past couple of years, ComScore reports that the year-over-year growth of app usage has declined by more than 10% per year, with the last apparent growth in Q4 of 2014. This leads me to believe that perhaps we are closely approaching peak app usage, with fatigue setting in a bit.
Graphic and Information Source: comScore Mobile Metric, U.S., Age 18+
I decided to dive in even deeper to my personal app usage habits. Every trend I saw in my usage habits was matched by cold, hard facts: I hardly download apps anymore, and over the past year, 49% of smartphone users download less than two apps per year; In the moment of need, I typically turn to an internet search instead of an app, which 91% of mobile users tend to do as well. It appears that over course of the past year, the amount of unique visitors to mobile websites has increased by 36%, which is considerable when comparing against the whopping 7% growth experienced by mobile apps over the same time. All of the sudden, my phone usage and how I interact with content on my phone seemed to be deemed the norm, not the outlier. People may not have experienced full-blown app fatigue, but it is evident that the last thing people are saying today is "There's an app for that".