Mobile APP development encounters bottleneck? What should developers do?

Editor's note: At present, there are enough mobile phone apps, and some functional apps are gradually replaced by the functions of mobile phones. However, there are not many real killer apps. Whenever a stable and powerful app is available, it will definitely be popular. If you can't be a pig on the cusp of the storm, then being a hunter in the deep mountains and forests is not bad.

Due to my work, I am exposed to all kinds of new apps, but most of the time I delete them after trying them or reporting on them. If you are working on an unfinished mobile app, you may feel uncomfortable after reading this article. After several years of explosive growth, I now have an increasingly strong question: with the proliferation of apps, is it still a good time to make apps?

Growth trend of the number of App Store applications from 2008 to 2014

What is explosive growth? Let's take a look at the data. According to Wikipedia, as of August 2014, the number of apps on Google Play was over 1.3 million; a month later, the number of apps on the App Store also exceeded 1.3 million. Since Google Play and the App Store reached 1 million apps in July 2013 and October 2013, respectively, you can see that in the past year or so, the number of apps on both platforms has increased by more than 300,000, which means that on average, more than 800 new apps appear every day.

In China, Wandoujia's data showed that in January 2014, the number of apps it collected exceeded 1 million, and the latest data in 2014 showed that the number had risen to 1.5 million. Since some domestic developers do not have the habit of submitting Android apps to Google Play, it is not surprising that the number of Android apps in China is higher than the statistics of Google Play.

This is definitely not good news for startups that are developing apps, after all, your competitors are increasing. But in addition to the surge in the number of applications, I have two more bad news.

First, let's look at the data. According to data from mobile data analysis company Flurry, mobile app usage in 2014 increased by 76% year-on-year, while the figure was 115% in 2013. (Flurry defines "usage" as a user opening an app and recording a "session.")

The left picture shows the data of 2014, and the right picture shows the data of 2013

From the above chart, we can see that except for the two categories of lifestyle and shopping, health, which have seen relatively good growth in usage, the growth rates of other categories of applications such as tools, efficiency, social, communication, music, entertainment, and games have all declined to varying degrees.

PingWest has explained in previous articles why there has been a significant increase in the usage of lifestyle and shopping apps. As for health apps, everyone should be able to guess that as iOS and Android both implemented body data tracking at the system level in 2014, coupled with the rise of wearable smart hardware, this has directly led to an explosion in the usage of apps in this category.

So the first bad news is that the growth of mobile app usage is slowing down in almost all categories. On top of that, the growth bonus of smartphones is disappearing.

According to IDC's forecast, China's smartphone shipments in 2015 will grow by about 7.8% compared to 2014, the first time the growth rate has dropped to single digits since 2009. Globally, in 2013, global smartphone shipments were 1.0042 billion units, up 38.4% from 725.3 million units in 2012; in 2014, global smartphone shipments were about 1.27 billion units, up 26.3% year-on-year; in 2015, global smartphone shipments are expected to be 1.4 billion units, but the year-on-year growth rate is only a little more than 10%. According to IDC's calculations, from 2014 to 2018, the global smartphone compound annual growth rate is 9.8%. So the growth dividend of smartphones is also slowly disappearing.

For mobile app developers, the surge in the number of apps, the slowdown in the growth of app usage in multiple categories, and the gradual disappearance of the smartphone demographic dividend are not good news. They mean:

1. You have more and more competitors;

2. Users already spend a lot of time on their smartphones, but there are only 24 hours in a day, and this time is difficult to increase significantly;

3. The growth rate of new smartphone users is slowing down significantly.

I believe you have already felt the conflict between these factors. However, due to the emergence of various automated tools, developers can actually create new mobile applications faster and faster. Whether you want to make a web application or a native application, whether in China or abroad, there are some corresponding development tools that allow you to make a usable mobile application in a simpler way, and this will undoubtedly continue to stimulate the number of apps.

When there are more and more new apps, promotion becomes a hassle. In China, people in charge of channel promotion feel that the same promotion method cannot compare with the previous new download volume; abroad, even Mark Zuckerberg lamented that Facebook's "app download promotion ads" are really profitable. For those apps that are lucky enough to be installed on the phone by users, due to the low frequency of use, the "notification bar" has a new name - "entrance".

For new applications in categories such as tools and efficiency, in addition to facing promotion difficulties, there are also quality difficulties. Because there are many 80-point products in this category, whether on iOS or Android platforms, but new products of the same kind are often just passing. It is very difficult to use a 60-point product to grab the market of similar 80-point products. On Weibo, even Chun Yin, a former well-known product manager of NetEase and founder of the travel application "Chanyouji", lamented:

On the mobile Internet, there is only one situation that can survive and grow: "The user suddenly has a strong demand, and he knows very well that opening a certain app can fully meet this demand." All other weak demands, vague demands and niche demands will find it very difficult to survive.

So do you still think now is a good time to make an app?

Having said so much, I am not completely denying the idea of ​​making apps. In my opinion, as long as you make social apps and game apps fun and interesting, people will always be willing to play them; but if you are making an app that is dispensable to users, then maybe you should consider whether it is still worth doing, because relying on industry dividends, following the trend, and being a pig on the vent of the wind will no longer work. Simply put, the wind direction has changed.