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It is difficult to think of anything that is more hyped right now than iPhone apps. They are billed as a fast road to riches for developers, consumer love potion for brands and a universal snake oil to solve any problem to consumers. A cursory glance at the next hype level down will find yet more apps; for Androids and Blackberrys and WindowsMobile, and of course the revamped app stores such as Ovi.com and Vodafone 360.  The question no-one seems to ask is whether the hype is justified. After all, no single platform has more than 10% of the smart phone market (iPhone) and both Nokia and Samsung are bringing out new platforms in 2010, fragmenting the market further still. Consequently any brand or retailer (except the handset makers themselves) aiming to engage more than 10% of their market in commerce via mobile apps, will have to be prepared to develop, support, maintain and upgrade on multiple platforms.
From a consumer perspective too, the app story is pretty fragile. Excluding iPhone, less than 30% of smart phone owners have ever downloaded an app. And for iPhone apps, ninety percent of those downloaded are deleted within two weeks. If we then draw the commonplace comparison between customer engagement via internet connected PCs and customer engagement via smart phones, the hype seems positively barmy. The trend for PC behaviour is away from apps (or programs, as they used to be known) to Software As A Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing and Virtualisation – all ways of separating the physical link between software and hardware. New hardware launched is designed not to run apps but to place full focus on Internet connectivity, easy browsing and working “in the cloud”. And this is also the strategic direction of the big trendsetters Google and Apple; cloud hosted software and services. So Apps seem to be an interim solution. They are an easy and intuitive way for consumers to access a brand and to interact with it from their mobile. This is an interesting development and shows that brand engagement via mobile is appealing. Over time, however interaction via fully-fledged mobile browsers will replace apps. Mobile websites will be designed with mobile-based behaviour in mind (think transactions instead of browsing, think publication instead of research) rather than the slimmed down versions of PC websites that they are today. These mobile sites will be supported by near-ubiquity in smart phones and WiFi enabled handsets. Today 42% of all cell phones in the US are smart phones and in Europe the number is quite a bit higher. In-Stat projects that 25% of all phones shipped will be WiFi ready by 2012, enabling mobile commerce without an associated worry of data costs from the consumer’s side. Mobile apps are destined to be the tactical quick fix, whereas good, task oriented and user friendly mobile websites are what will drive consumer engagement over the years to come. Retailers need to start learning about long term consumer engagement via mobile, in order not to find themselves down a cul-de-sac when consumers move from apps to mobile browsers.
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