THAT’S THAT THEN. THE APP BOOM IS OVER.
Guess how many apps per month the average American smartphone user downloads? Go on, pick a number. You have one? Great. Whatever number you picked was wrong because the correct answer is zero. Yup. Zilch. Nada. Zip.
Recode have been investigating and the stats do paint a pretty convincing picture. Year on year the decline in downloads has been roughly 20%, and this in a market which is still growing globally. Does this mean the picture is rosier outside of the US? Well, yes and no. The top apps have seen 3% growth globally this year. That’s what they call a Pyrrhic Victory.
To anyone who has been following the app scene over the years this is not bad news. The insane proliferation of poor quality shovelware and the endless invasion of in-app advertising has long since soured those of us who went hunting for quality. High quality mobile experiences are of course still out there but they are buried under a mountain of match three clones, lawsuits from King and in-app purchases for hundreds of dollars.
Things aren’t helped by the awful search facilities of the App Store and Google Play. Reviews are all five star or one star. The herd mentality cannot be trusted when the heaviest downloaders of apps are kids, and they are not renowned for their astute weighing up of the pros and cons of app use. Comments like “lol this app so brokn” do not fill me with confidence that the user has fully explored the complexities of the application being considered.
More stringent quality curation would help to revitalise the app scene. If you have made a decent little shooting game, how can you get the word out there? What can you do? Right now the best answer to that question is ‘lead on another platform’. The gaming platforms have been trying to tackle this issue head-on for some time. Steam user reviews now have variable weighting according to time, to allow for a fairer impression of how a game plays at the present time (after they fixed that game-breaking bug, for example).
It’s hard to avoid cynicism when you think of mobile apps. For years now there have been far too many of them and the quality just hasn’t been there. Neither Google nor Apple seem concerned enough to raise their heads from the giant piles of money that they are sleeping on to do anything about it and so the decline continues. Perhaps now that the app boom is officially over they might actually rouse themselves and act, but I’m not holding my breath.