Mobile apps taking over your phone?

I know the feeling. Most of us find ourselves weeding out old and unused applications from our smartphones; apps we don’t even remember when and why we installed in the first place. 

At the beginning, the whole app experience was new and exciting. I personally downloaded more and more applications just to make sure I wasn't missing out on anything. When the amount of apps on my phone became overwhelming, I started to use the old-style directory system to make them easier to find. But now, after a few years and hundreds of apps, I am lost.

The whole experience of consuming data through mobile apps has gotten out of control. Is it really intuitive (or convenient) to install a specific app to read news from several publishers, buy goods from several retailers, or even check a train timetable? Let’s think about how it’s done on our laptops. We open the browser, search for the train timetable in Google, and that’s it – we have what we need. The information is immediately available, we just browse in and out without the need to install anything.

The whole mobile app mania started with iPhone. They wanted to provide the best user experience on mobile devices (which, back in 2007, the browser couldn’t support) and control the content and its potential revenue. But now businesses are no longer eager to share 30% of their revenues with Apple (The Financial Times is a text book example).  They prefer to build their own mobile web apps which are accessible to a wider audience and better maintained for multiple platforms. From a technical perspective, both browsers and development tools provide an easier user experience, which better suit a wide range of app development segments.

Between the preferred experience of searching and consuming without installing (… and removing) apps and the shift away from proprietary apps, my wish is that we will see more publishers, content developers, and users moving back to the browser.

-- On Kalich, Director of Product Marketing

Making traffic growth work for you

A recent report issued by Latitude Group caught my attention:  in Q2 2012, one in five website visits came from a mobile device – a 26% growth over Q1. At first it sounded like another standard item which shows the growth of the mobile Internet, but there was something bigger in between the lines.

Growth in mobile web visitors driven primarily by iOS

So, why did it catch my attention?

What’s surprising is how low this figure still is (20%) in comparison to the amazingly high growth of mobile traffic we constantly experience. With growth of 26% quarter over quarter, we will soon see 2 of every 5 website visits, or even more, coming from mobile devices. This means that while we haven’t yet reached a plateau in traffic growth, it won’t be long before mobile traffic overtakes fixed traffic with respect to page visits.

So what does this mean for mobile operators? On the one hand, their window of opportunity to take action in managing traffic is rapidly closing; but at the same time, it is rapidly materializing with respect to monetizing this OTT data. It is time to manage the data growth while monetizing the incremental data.

The good news for mobile operators is that there are advanced technologies out there that can help them with both challenges simultaneously. By adopting solutions from companies, like Flash Networks, that understand these opportunities and combine cost saving solutions with revenue-generating solutions in a single system, operators don’t have to choose only one direction to pursue. Investing in only one may be too little too late. The smart investment is a solution that can grow in both directions.

-- Gil Mildworth, Director of Business Development