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