Of Apps and Men. (aka. UGI - User Generated Internet)

If Steinbeck was living in today’s world; quite possibly the name of his legendary novel would be like this. Because if you look around, or if you just look at yourselves, you can clearly say that we are all become a Lennie. We can’t stop doing one specific thing everyday, every hour, almost every minute;

“Touch.”

—

“App”.

This word exists in English since 1985 but with the beginning of iEra; particularly of iPhone, this abbreviation entered in our lives more and more each and everyday.

App. Shortened for “Application”. Oxford says that the definition is;

So how come an abbreviation became so important and common suddenly?

To be honest; I believe that it may be the third most important shortened word after TV and PC.

Steve Jobs’s iPhone brought apps to us; we were “non developer regular user”. They took the catwalk on the “AppStore”. In the beginning we all treated them like mobile games of add-ons. But suddenly; a very clever slogan came from nowhere, which is in my opinion as powerful as Nike’s “Just do it”, and we all understood that this App thing is not that simple. Because what this slogan tought us was; whatever you need with you;

“There is an app for that!”

And this is how we all entered the App world. Whatever we need on our mobile devices was there as an App. With the sign of the emerging new market, other players like Android and Windows sat on the table to taste this new dessert. As a result, market had an amazing growth percentages and Apps started to create their own platforms and users despite of the mobile platforms they are working on.

Just like me writing this article on an iOS tablet, making corrections on an Android phone and submitting to Medium from a laptop but making them all on one app; Evernote.

“One app to rule them all, one app to find them.”

Are you aware of this huge user behaviour impact? Are you aware of the massive change which is just around the corner? This means that in the beginning apps were in need of mobile devices and platforms, but now, apps are creating their own platforms. And they are taking their raising power from the unlimited source; users.

You are waking by your Clock app alarm, switching it off and right after washing your face you check your Facebook and Twitter from their apps and checking your inbox bu mail app. Just before you left home, you check the weather app and traffic app, send a message via Whatsapp to your collague that you may be late because of the traffic. When you are on the way to job, you shoot the picture of the funny sign behind the truck in front of you and send it to instagram and when traffic jam happens, you spent some time with Tinder app first, then start snapchatting with your collague about the new bitchy supervisor at the office. And if the jam takes more time, you start to change your job to a closer area of your home and you check job openings on LinkedIn. If you can’t find anything, you start looking Skyscanner for a weekend escape.

Is it too familiar? Or do you find this a little bit exaggerated? If so, take a look at this chart:

UGC (User Generated Content) widely accepted as a term for social media. A social media platform which has posts, videos, photos that created by users. The definition was generally limited to its social platform. But nowadays; users define how the app should be and apps started building their own crowd and platforms apart from mobile platforms. This new era pushes app developers to learn more of users’ behaviours and habits which also led them to learn more of their user.

This is the reason why every company, every dev house or every individual developer try to create an “everlasting” app and stay on high grounds. This is what we, industry professionals know already. What most of us don’t know is; future lies in a “User Generated Internet (UGI)”. At least I call it like this.

Journey of man from mIRC to Snapchat.

What does it mean? It means that; in a not-so-far-future; every user will have their own internet through their apps. Users will define their “digital habitats” as a result of the UGI.

I really believe that THIS is big deal.

Brands, developers, enterprises… Are you ready? How much ready? Is it enough just t? develope a nice looking app? Or marketing the app with a big ad budgets is enough? If the app is in the “Top Charts”, does it mean success?

Or success of the app is hidden in somewhere else?

A future shaping by human touch and gesture.

“Touch” and “Gesture” are two keywords which literally work as a “key” for users’ to access their own digital habitat through mobile screen. This two term collects all the actions, data, usage and behaviour of the user and gives you meaningful -and quite insightful- results for the best of your app.

Apps which are “Paid” and which has “In-app Purchase” make revenue for sure. But as you know, wisdom is the real power, not the money.

CRM was the famous term in digital until last year, when another term popped out from nowhere; “BIG DATA!”. But for some reason, while everybody were screaming of “Mobile is coming!” no one bat an eye on apps’ CRM, data, etc.

If future will be forming on user generated internet, it is not so hard to guess that the door to the digital habitat of user lay on the data and actions on mobile screens; “App analytics”.

It is really unbelievable that we use and pay attention on web analytics, also mobile web analytics but ignore the superstar of mobile; apps. Most of the developers and dev houses don’t use these tools. Worst is; many of them don’t even know what to do with it. Because they are developers, not marketers. This is the point to shift the point of view for developers and the point to gain a new perspective for enterprises.

The only way to win on chess is; reading the moves of the person on the other side of the board.

There are not so many companies giving this service, just a few global companies handling this process as it deserves. Now we have a new player from Turkey but globally; AppAnalytics.

My kindly offer is; work with either AppAnalytics’s one of offices’ located in Istanbul, London, Silicon Valley or any other app analytic service, add this service with all its’ benefits to your app development and marketing plans.

Your users’ fingers show you the right path to follow. Don’t miss this chance.