There's "App" To Be An App

Mobility is no longer a communications utility, but a media distribution hub. Our mobile phones now account for over 10% percent of our media consumption time. So what does this mean? The answer in a nutshell is apps. We spend over 2 hours a day on the average using apps. We don’t even surf the web as much as we use apps on our cell phone. I took a look at the trends users had with apps this past year. For developers and publishers to be successful in mobility, these trends might be helpful for future content as they create apps for mobile devices. Let's take a look at the most popular mobile apps and examine how mobile usage is an addictive activity.

Here's an overview of the top 4 trends with apps.

• Those Games: Games account for about 70% of app usage. However, even with the most addictive games, consumers' attention is fleeting and companies run the risk of becoming "one-hit wonders."
• Social Media: Social networking apps are the second largest time bucket for mobile users. 39% of mobile users access social networks. This includes mobile versions of desktop favorites, as well as mobile-first networks like Instagam, the popular picture sharing app. Mobile holds promise for the social media catagory, but its future is still not rock solid.
• Hitch A Ride: The only realistic way for mobile success is to take a popular usage category and build a product that piggybacks on that activity to provide a unique mobile exclusive experience. Instagram did it with photos, "Angry Birds" with games, but other usage categories such as news, weather, travel, video etc. are waiting for a similar hit.
• Portal Poison: Mobile is a fragmented space and consumers seem to like it that way. No one has succeeded deploying services via a single app or mobile website. The desktop portal is fading with the advent of mobile. Web email is on the decline and carrier attempts to build mobile portals sadly have tanked.

So what does this all mean? Simply put, we have become an app crazy society and advertisers as well as marketers need to pay close attention this year on what mobility has become. The web is no longer a key player when it comes to mobility. Our loyalty is to no one, especially in gaming. We get bored quickly and games come and go as fast as they are developed. Developers will need to be consistently re-inventing their apps to keep the users interested. 2013 promises to be another banner year for mobility. Your cell phone is now your office, your gaming center, and your social networking base all rolled into one. You can conference call, you can take pictures, you can shoot video in HD and you can send them instantly pretty much anywhere in the world. You can’t let lost, you can GPS track to about anywhere, and we pretty much sleep with our phone now. Oh you can’t sleep? There’s an app for that. Happy mobility in 2013!