Peak app

Smartphone owners always lookout to download apps they think will be useful. If you are fortunate enough to have a consumer download your application, then odds are that they will delete it after one use if they find it troublesome or difficult to use.

 According to a Nielsen study (http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2015/so-many-apps-so-much-more-time-for-entertainment.html) that average adult uses less than 30 apps per month. Over time the lack of using an app leads to the unused apps being purged.

Several studies estimate roughly 10% of apps are used enough times to be retained. This means even if your app is downloaded the odds are it will eventually be removed and probably never used.

Brands are spending between $8-12 in advertising to earn a single application download. This means the true customer acquisition cost is roughly $80-120. Good luck recuperating that expense.

The Apple and Google App Store's boast of 2 million or more applications. Some, dated, research shows nearly 60% of apps are never downloaded.

Apple recently made the barrier to success even higher by enforcing section 4.2.6 of their application guideline requirements. This section gives them the authority to reject and remove apps at their discretion. They have been purging apps in mass they don't consider meet these arbitrary guidelines.

Why have consumers stopped downloading applications? Space, both physical and temporal. Mobile phones and tablets only have so much disk space. Many applications now need 100 MB-1 GB of space. While a few 128 GB iPhones are sold, the typical iPhone size is 32 GB. After personal photos, videos, and music, there is little to no room for applications.

While we have become a society that can never seem to leave our mobile screens, there is still only so much time in a day. Market analysts pay close attention to what we do with our screen time. Kids watch videos and play silly games. Adults live in social media with Facebook and Snapchat owning their phones. Adults also play silly games, such as 2048.

Out of the top five applications one these App Stores, Facebook owns three. The average adult spends over 2 hours a day in the Facebook universe looking at photos and videos. Text messaging is being replaced with Facebook Messenger. Millennials are addicted to Instagram, sharing, liking, and commenting on photos and videos non-stop.

Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and Facebook-owned Instagram are the top three mobile applications. They are followed by YouTube, SnapChat, and Gmail. Two of those are owned by Google. After those applications, the distribution curve drops to nearly zero.

We, mobile consumers, have settled into usage habits and have found that the need for applications has passed.

Installing an application, even if it is free, consists of eight steps, each step losing 20% of the initial interested base. The reason Amazon implemented one click purchasing was to eliminate friction and increase sales.

The web is relatively frictionless. You click a link in an email or maybe search for something, clicking the best perceived result, and within a few seconds you have downloaded or installed the web page you need. Little to no friction and next to no device resources have been used.

In contrast to the distribution of app usage in a given month, the average consumer visits over 100 websites. That is roughly 20 times more variety than their application distribution. This means there is more opportunity to engage customers via the web than native applications.

The web satisfies two important consumer requirements of minimal resource investment. Very little time or disk space is needed. In fact, they do not need to uninstall your website when they clean out their device so that they can make more videos to share on Instagram.

This is where PWA have risen in importance. Companies want their icons on consumer's devices. This symbolizes a relationship and hopefully increases sales or other engagement statistics. When brand engagement is cheap for the customer, they are more likely to take the step to make you part of their daily life.

Browsers are providing the engagement platform, but you still need to meet their requirements. That is what you are going to learn in this book.