Mobile App: Business Development Models Change To Serve Marketing
Mobile App – One hundred ninety-seven billion downloads and a market that is now worth billions of dollars: the phenomenon of mobile apps is significantly changing the concept of development but also that of customer care. From maximizing users to monetizing their use, today, the focus is on traceability to support CRM. The DevOps model is the undisputed protagonist, from back-end to front-end.
The mobile app market is ten years old. According to the most updated data, today, there are 968 thousand apps available on Google Play, 498 thousand on the Apple App Store, and 7 thousand on the Amazon App Store (Source App Annie 2017). Since the launch of the first iPhone in January 2007, the mobile app industry has become a multi-figure business model.
The revenues generated by the two leading platforms, Apple and Google, have reached a turnover of 89 billion dollars (Source: App Annie 2017). Time spent using mobile applications grew by more than 20%, reaching 900 billion hours (Source: Comscore 2017). The latest research shows that the apps downloaded by users this year will reach 197 billion (Source: Statista 2017).
From Mobile Apps To The App Economy, Tools And Strategies Change
As experts point out, the data that best describes the mobile app ecosystem are the download statistics: just by comparing the 2016 data with the 2017 estimates, we go from 149 billion downloads to 197 billion, with a projection for 2021 of 353 billion downloads (Source: Statista 2017). In detail, observing the statistics of app downloads of the two leading mobile operating systems, iOS and Android, we find Google Play in the lead, thanks to a business model that is clearly different from that of Apple.
Android, in fact, is available for a considerable number of construction variants of smartphones and tablets. At the same time, iOS records its numbers only with two products: iPhone and iPad exclusively Apple-made. In summary, the two players pursue different paths, and it is difficult to say whether one of the two models is more successful than the other.
How Many Apps Do We Use On Average Every Day?
Beyond the numbers linked to downloads, the analyses remind us that people who download mobile apps only use very few of them, uninstalling those they no longer use. Once they have downloaded an app, one in 4 consumers uses it only once because it doesn’t work well or doesn’t work at all: 6 out of 10 users say they have had problems (Source: Localytics 2016). Internationally, research says that users use up to ten apps per day (Source: Techcrunch 2017).
On the other hand, have on average 30 apps on their smartphone, but they use five every day and 13 in a month. As regards branded mobile apps, 72% of Italians have installed at least one from a telephone operator, 61% from a bank (assessed as the best in terms of quality), 39% from a large-scale retail trade brand, 29 % of a utility manager and 23% of a clothing brand (Source: Mobile B2C Strategy Observatory, Polytechnic of Milan, 2017).
How And Why Sophisticated Marketing Cares About Mobile Apps
There are 50.8 million mobile users in Italy, with a smartphone penetration rate of 85% of the population. Twenty-eight million Italians, i.e. 47% of the people, connect to social media from mobile. (Source: We Are Social 2017). Furthermore, 68% of Italians equipped with smartphones have Wi-FI always active, 19% have Bluetooth always busy, and 37% always have the geolocation function active (Source: “Mobile B2C strategy 2017” – Doxa).
Mobile apps that exploit geofencing are a vital strategy for marketing: thanks to the virtual perimeter that is active even when the device is moving, it is possible to know at a particular moment the current location of a user and their proximity to specific contact points (touch point) to trigger a programmed communication.
This action is strategic on the front-end and back-end side: on the one hand, it triggers a report via email or SMS to the user of the device; on the other, it triggers a message to the operator who, having activated the perimeter, can carry out monitoring and mapping from which detailed metrics can be obtained to provide better services.
This is one of the signs that indicate a change in the mobile app business model. Initially, based on the number of downloads, over time, it moved first to the average usage time and today to the entire behavioral back-end management. Marketing, in fact, has understood that there is another parallel business of the app economy: it is the study of user behavior to feed an advanced CRM, triggering increasingly precise personalization of communication and service.
Apps For Business: DevOps To Support Marketing
For brands, the new challenge of the app economy is to release mobile apps capable of satisfying users and allowing the traceability of a considerable amount of information on navigation criteria, choices, behaviors and, in general, the questions that each user asks support, assistance or simply by clicking on the calls to action associated with online and offline promos and initiatives.
The smartphone has become an inseparable and indispensable companion of individual productivity and free time, and for this reason, marketers have started to work ever more closely with developers. To maintain high user engagement, apps must constantly be updated to be attractive and to keep up with technological evolution. Smartphones and tablets are the fast fashion of electronics: the life cycle of the devices is in the order of a few months.
This imposes on programmers new development logic linked not only to the requirements coming from marketers but also to all compliance relating to the rules of management and protection of user data. Similarly happens in the B2B sector where 79% of companies use more than ten mobile apps to manage their business. The increase in apps in contexts where sensitive data is accessed must raise companies’ attention to the dangers linked to cybercrime.
Business Mobile Apps
To mention the latest attacks, Hummingbird infected 85 million devices, QuadRooter approximately 900 million devices, and The Godless 850 thousand (Source: “Mobile Security and Risk Review” – MobileIron 2017 ). That’s why DevOps has become the core app development strategy.
It is a methodology that exploits the new logic of sharing and collaboration between developers (DEV) and operations (OPS) to accelerate the design, testing and release times of corporate application solutions, both in traditional and cloud environments. The development team works synergistically: while someone rewrites the services that don’t work, others refine those that are optimal for the app under development.
Conclusion
All this ensures the quality and security of the developed software. By introducing a DevOps strategy, brands can test and implement new features and applications in a significantly faster and more functional way, guaranteeing the quality of the codes developed. This ensures the success of a mobile app, avoiding the release of faulty applications, the leading cause of disaffection and cancellation of an app.
