Yes I Said It, RIP Mobile Apps
Date: September 6th, 2016
This article originally appeared on LinkedIn Pulse.
While many businesses are still in the learning phase of mobile apps, the ground is shifting. Changing consumer behavior and technology improvements are spelling out the end of the app era in the next few years.
You’ve likely seen some of the stats… the average smartphone user downloads zero new apps per month, between 80 and 90% of apps are downloaded, used once, and then deleted. Eighty-five percent of smartphone users spend almost all of their time using just 5 apps. Major apps (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc) saw a 20% drop in downloads from May 2015 to May 2016. The list goes on…
Furthermore, companies looking to build apps also have to consider multiple ecosystems (Android, iOS, etc.) and platforms (phone, tablet, etc) which leads to expensive development costs and ongoing maintenance. Most engineering teams now have dedicated groups to each ecosystem — creating redundancy and unnecessary expense.
Finally, consumers have moved on from their fascination with downloading and using new apps, the market has become too saturated, and businesses will have to evolve their technology strategies accordingly.
Ok, so if apps are going to die, what’s next? What changes will occur to get us there?
What’s Next
The future will look more like what we’re used to seeing on our desktops and laptops than what we’ve become accustomed to on our mobile devices. Apps won’t be designed and developed for a single platform, and you won’t need to download them from a special store.
Most importantly, adding a web app to your home or launch screen will be a simple process that will go well beyond its current functionality of just bookmarking or providing a shortcut to the website.
For most of us, this should be a good thing. At the outset, it will save tons of time and money and labor that’s now required for every business to not only have an app, but to build and update one for each OS separately. It will lower the barriers, making the experience more seamless across platforms. And it will allow more companies to compete for space on our phones, which means we’ll have better products to show for it.
Mobile apps will look much like what we’re used to seeing from web apps today, surfing seamlessly from Mint to Slack to Gmail.
But to make that happen, we need to first make some improvements.
The technology and infrastructure that underlies our mobile web experience has been holding us back for years. It’s one of the major reasons that native apps became so popular in the first place — you simply couldn’t create the same experience through the mobile web.
The Future of the Mobile Web
To bring about the next phase of the mobile web, there are really only five major things that need to change. And many of them are already underway.
1. Better Performance and Experience
Web apps need a smarter framework for dealing with the unique circumstances of a mobile device.
At the very least, they should load immediately — with or without an internet connection. In the current era, we’re used to apps that spin our little data icon on load up, with no functionality if we have a bad connection or don’t have service.
New technologies like the Service Worker API allow developers to create apps that work under various circumstances and network conditions — dispatching requests and various tasks for the browser to handle in the background.
Things will continue to work and be updated behind the scenes, even if the user isn’t interacting with the app. And when they return, their instance will be retained but with new data or updates as necessary.
Additionally, Google’s AMP project aims at addressing the standards and frameworks used to create mobile web apps that are performant.
2. Offline Operability
One of the longstanding gripes about the mobile web is that it’s simply useless without an internet connection. If you can’t access a website, then you can’t use the app — whether it actually requires an internet connection or not.
To solve this, again our friend, the Service Worker and local storage will allow developers to cache portions of their app on the user’s phone, storing it locally and making it accessible without a signal or connection.
3. Deep OS Integration
Our mobile devices can do a hell of a lot of things — from tracking our location to taking photos and beaming files across the room.
At this point, web apps have access to some of these features like basic location data and camera access. But much of the hardware is still out of reach. Soon, phone manufacturers and browser developers will give us more power to leverage the existing information inside the phone to create richer experiences.
For example, mobile payments (i.e. Apple Pay) and advanced media support (i.e microphone and low level camera functionality) will need to be accessible in the web context.
4. Containerization
Everything on your mobile device runs either as its own app or as a tab in your browser. But this will soon change.
In addition to being able to add apps to your home screen directly from the web, those apps should also launch in their own containers (not just a browser tab) and operate much like native apps do today.
This will provide a better experience for the user, not being bounded by the limitations of the browser application. It will also protect instances of the app from the browser crashing and let you return to the app instance in the same state that you left it, without forcing you to refresh the page.
5. Push Notifications and Alerts
From a business and developer standpoint, one of the best things about native apps is having the ability to send alerts, push notifications, and pop up badges for the user. This drives increased engagement and lets the app feel more seamless than traditional experiences where things are happening and the user is none the wiser unless they access it directly.
For mobile web apps to truly take off, mobile operating systems will need to extend this functionality to web apps and provide a new set of permissions and access procedures that allow these apps to use the same real-time messaging features to engage users.
Summary: Your Mobile App (Or Not) Strategy
Will native apps die completely? No. But as these 5 areas are supported by browsers and developers, it’s safe to say that 99% of app use-cases fall away.
As we move closer and closer to this evolution in the mobile landscape, businesses will be once again faced with the decision of how to plan their roadmap. Native versus web will become a much more difficult decision as the distinction between the two blurs.
This should also come as a word of caution to businesses currently planning the future of their technology. Relying on native apps in today’s climate may lead to higher costs in the near future as users shift away from this model and businesses are forced to, essentially, discard their native applications in favor of making changes and improvements to their web apps.
Technology executives should carefully consider the lifecycle of your product and your development schedule and budget to plan for these changes.
At this point, it seems inevitable that development tools & web standards will catch up with the market and the evolution will happen quickly. It’s just a matter of when.
