The app is flooded, and now it's a good time to do it?

As a result of the work, usually have access to a variety of new apps, but most of the time I have tried or reported after the deletion of the random. If you have an unfinished mobile application in hand, it may make you feel uncomfortable to read this article. After a few years of explosive growth, I now have an increasingly strong question: Is it a good time to do apps when app is already flooded?

The growth trend of App Store application in the 2008-2014

What is called explosive growth? Let's look at the data first. According to Wikipedia data, as of August 2014, Google play on the number of applications in more than 1.3 million, after one months, the App Store also more than 1.3 million applications. Since Google Play and the App Store were built into 1 million apps in July 2013 and October 2013 respectively, you can see that over the next year or so, both applications are growing at more than 300,000. That means more than 800 new apps appear on average every day.

In the country, data from pea pods showed that in January 2014 the number of apps it included was more than 1 million, while the latest figures for 2014 showed that the figure had risen to 1.5 million. Since some developers in the country do not submit Android apps to Google Play, it is not surprising that China has more Android apps than Google Play statistics.

This is certainly not good news for startups that are doing apps, after all, your competitors are getting more and more. But in addition to the surge in apps, I have two bad news here.

First we look at the data, according to the mobile data analysis company Flurry data, 2014 mobile application usage increased by 76%, and 2013 this number is 115%. (Flurry for "use", the user opens the app and logs a session.) )

Flurry123.jpg
The picture on the left is 2014 data, the right figure is 2013 data

As you can see from the above picture, in addition to lifestyle and shopping, health, the two categories of application usage has a better growth, the rest of the tools, efficiency, social, communications, music, entertainment, games, such as the classification of the increase in the number of different degrees of decline.

Lifestyle and the use of shopping applications why there is a big increase in the previous article in the Pingwest product play has been explained; As for the application of health, we should all think that, with iOS, Android in 2014 years, the body data tracking system level, Coupled with the rise of wearable smart hardware, this has directly led to an explosion in the use of this classification application.

So the first bad news is that almost all categories of mobile apps are slowing in usage growth. In addition, the growth dividend for smartphones is disappearing.

According to IDC, China's smartphone shipments in 2015 will grow by about 7.8% compared with 2014, the first drop in single-digit growth since 2009. If globally, 2013 global smartphone shipments are 1.0042 billion, compared with 2012 's 725.3 million growth of 38.4%, 2014 global smartphone shipments around 1.27 billion, the year-on-year growth of 26.3%; 2015, Global smartphone shipments are expected to be 1.4 billion, but the year-on-year growth rate is just over 10%. According to IDC estimates, from 2014 to 2018, the global smartphone composite annual growth rate is 9.8%. So the growth dividend for smartphones is fading.

For mobile app developers, the three signals are not good news, with the number of applications exploding, a slowdown in the use of multiple categories, and the gradual disappearance of the smartphone demographic dividend, which means:

1. More and more competitors;

2. Users have spent a lot of time on smartphones, but only 24 hours a day;

3. The growth of new smartphone users is slowing sharply.

I believe you have felt the conflict between these factors. But thanks to the advent of a variety of automated tools, developers can actually make new mobile apps more and more quickly. Whether you want to do a Web application or a native application, both at home and abroad, there are corresponding development tools that allow you to make a usable mobile application in a simpler way, which will undoubtedly continue to spawn the number of apps.

As new apps become more and more, promotion becomes a hassle. In the country, the people responsible for channel promotion will feel the same way of promotion, now the new download volume is not compared with previous; in foreign countries, even Mark Zuckerberg also lamented Facebook's "app download advertising" really make money. For those apps that have the privilege of being installed on the phone, the use of the app is so low that the "notice bar" has a new name-"Portal".

For new applications such as tools and efficiencies, there is a quality dilemma in addition to the challenges of promotion. Because of this type of application, whether in iOS or on the Android platform, there are 80 points of the product, but the new product of the same kind is often just a passing level. It is difficult to rob the market of the same 80-point products with 60 points. On Weibo, even the former NetEase well-known product managers, tourism applications, "Cicada travels" founder Sterling Silver also lamented:

On the mobile internet, there is only one thing left to live on: "The user suddenly has a strong demand, and he knows that opening an app can fully satisfy that demand." "All other weak demand, vague demand and niche demand, will survive quite difficult."

So you still think it's a good time to do apps?

Having said so much, I'm not completely denying the app thing. As far as I'm concerned, it's just fun to do, like social apps, game apps, it's always been someone who wants to play, but if you're doing an app that's not for the user, then maybe it's worth considering whether it's worthwhile, because it's not going to work with the industry dividend, the homeopathy, the pig in the tuyere. In short, the wind is changing.