The growing influence of apps
It is hard to believe that when the first iPhone came out in 2007, the App store did not exist. In fact it was near enough a full year before the App store opened.
On day one it had 500 apps available for download. Today it has over 250,000 and has had more than 6.5 billion downloads.
Asymco, a market intelligence company, earlier this week estimated that with the current download rate at around 17 million apps per day, they are set to outpace music downloads in the very near future:
"As can be seen, the App store has reached the same total downloads in 2.2 years as the Itunes Music Store reached after five years. The two curves are likely to be the same height (around 13 billion each) before the year is over."
Source: Asymco
While Apple's app store represents quite a big part of the overall picture there are other competitors that are also experiencing healthy growth from Android to Windows marketplace to Nokia's Ovi store.
The second biggest app store is that operated by Getjar. To date it has had over 1.05 billion downloads and supports over 2,000 devices.
Take all of these apps together and it's not hard to see the impact they have had on our lives from keeping us entertained to keeping us informed and from helping us navigate to helping us connect.
Mr Laurs told the BBC that despite being a young and growing sector:
"The Forum recognises that apps have become an important part of our lives. Interestingly the importance of apps is more relevant to the developing world than the developed world. It is here that the proliferation of mobile phones and their importance underlines that part of the story.
"They don't have the luxury in many cases to access a desktop computer and the phone is how people access the wired world. The ratio of internet users is nine mobile users to one desktop user. In places like India, the app is the world, is the internet. They don't have anything else."
But Mr Laurs predicts apps will play an even more significant part in our lives as the types of devices change and the number of touchscreens proliferate.
As everything from our fridge to utilities and from coffee machines to the TV becomes connected as part of the internet of things, apps will become even more important and so will the way we interact with them. Mr Laurs reckons that means the traditional search box could one day go the way of the dodo, as least as far as the majority of devices are concerned.
Mr Laurs said:
"This type and menu based experience for phones is not working. People don't like typing on their phones, they like touching and clicking and that is driven by apps. The mobile phone is the beginning and many, many more touch devices are coming. Soon every human will be surrounded by a dozen screens at least and each screen will be a touch screen because it is an interactive screen and the best concept model of how humans have communicated this way to date is the app experience."
Mr Laurs' view of the future is bad news for Google which this week launched Google Instant as a way to take the search experience from the fast lane to the turbo charged lane by offering answers to search queries before users even finish typing.
Mr Laurs added:
"The new paradigm of using online service and offline services is the icon based, touch based apps experience as opposed to this dotcom search based internet experience that requires a keyboard.
"The icon for the app, which is a representation of the icon-to-service model, is really starting to replace the dotcom experience or the typing experience where type and search was appropriate for desk tops. That model doesn't work for all these new touch based devices and the app becomes the new model that replaces the dotcom model and in many cases enhances them."
Whatever your view of the future, there is no doubt that clicking on an icon to access a service is a quick and easy way to get to where you want to go to. If Mr Laurs' vision comes to pass, Google and other search engines will have a major job on their hand to ensure the search box maintains its dominance and relevancy.
Other WEF technology pioneers in the IT and new media space include foursquare, Scribd, Reputation Defender and Spotify.
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Comments
Maggie Shiels.
"..fridge to utilities and from coffee machines to the TV becomes connected as part of the internet of things, apps ... type and menu based experience for phones is not working. People don't like typing on their phones, they like touching and clicking.."
are mobile phones evolving into all-singing, all-dancing remote controls?
and will we still be able to make phone calls?
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The usual hysteria and hype over anything "new". Typing won't disappear until Voice Recognition software is good enough to recognise every language and dialect, which won't be anytime soon...
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First: many of the downloads from the App Store are free - so not quite a fair comparison with iTunes Store.
Second: Laurs bigs up the icon, but the more icons, the harder to find the right one. What's the practical limit on a desktop, iPad or iPhone? It is interesting that on the desktop Windows 7 adds a search box to the Start menu; I use that pretty whenever the app I need is not pinned to the Start Menu or Task bar. So Windows 7 uses icons for top 10-20 apps, beyond that, search sidesteps the nested menu model of all earlier Windows systems. Perhaps search isn't in decline after all.
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"will we still be able to make phone calls?"
Possibly, try not to think of them as phones-with-extras but rather portable computing/communication devices that may or (in the case of the iPod, for example) may not include "GSM voice calls" as a feature.
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This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
Apps are only programs that make the device or a remote server do something. In some cases that can be done just by touch but if I need to interact and supply data I need to key it in (through a soft or hard input function). As has been pointed out by Nigel Thomas too many apps act like stacked menus and we are back to search. There are already too many apps to even search properly on Apples app store.
so as usual the answer is not one thing or the other. Apps are very easy to use and intuitive for some things but their very number drives us back to search. Don't forget underneath an app may be a search function - who is providing that...
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i dont find that many apps very useful, i only really use the social networking ones and the news one. there are enough to keep everyone entertained and happy
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As an Android user I use apps on a daily basis. However, I don't see much difference in these compared to the old games that came on mobiles all those years ago, like Snake. However, all that has happened is that we have changed what we call them. Before you would install a programme on your computer, now we call it an app.
Personally, I don't use a huge number of 3rd party apps on my phone, but I do try out a large number, keeping the most useful/fun and deleting the rest. My favourite is probably GameBoid. Instead what I view as more significant is widgets, which offer detailed information without having to find the relevant app. Of course widgets aren't an option on an iPhone so probably don't gain the same amount of press outside the really techy types.
Also, @3 that search is also in Vista and I use it all the time as I like a clean desktop, with a dock (I use RocketDock) at the top for the few programmes I use all the time (browser, media player, Steam, Spotify, Guitar Pro). It is quicker for me to type the first couple of letters of a word an press enter on a keyboard than chase across the desktop with a mouse for all the others. I also have all my games linked to my Steam account so they don't need to sit on my desktop either.
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I feel a bit "left out" on this apps thingy.
I am developer but found out quite late about Apps and its potential, and at present I feel its near exhaustion, i.e. the commonly used tasks have apps now, almost all of them.
Only special / bespoke tasks can be added to App store now, 250,000+ is a BIG number for software. Every conceivable task is "Appified" by now.
Regards.
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It is easy to see that this blog is written by someone who uses, and only uses and iPhone. You might tend to find that apps are more important if you an iPhone owner who have a drastically restricted internet with the exclusion of Flash which gives all other phones a far superior internet experience and favour the small app web 'snapshot' view that iPhone users tend to be confined to. Especially when you consider although there have been alot of touchscreen phones made that DO actually have keyboards and very good ones at that. I do admit that the one thing I miss about my old phone is it's keyboard which is way superior to the, although a fairly good, touch-screen experience.
It is also curiously interesting the graph that compares music downloads to app downloads is actually, wait for it, and Apple iTunes comparison rather than an industry wide comparison. It is only really of interest to people who are enthusiastic about Apple is the BBC making a statement here that Apple is the only consumer technology firm they would like us to know about?
How much professional work is actually performed using 'apps'? Claiming that Apps are taking over full professional applications makes as much sense to me as claiming that Lego is the new regulation standard building bricks to be used in the construction industry. It is a sad state of affairs to see a company that once created cutting edge graphic machines in the 80's is now reduced to an app. selling consumer electronic firm.
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hon3stly #11.
"It is a sad state of affairs to see a company that once created cutting edge graphic machines in the 80's is now reduced to an app. selling consumer electronic firm."
could it be that Steve 'The Journey is the Reward' Jobs has arrived, at his bank vault??
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It's so nice to see the plaque we created being used great job BBC!!!
www.PosterboySF.com
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