Is your app stuck in 2010?

On June 29, 2007, the first iPhone was released. Smartphones have gone through many revolutions since then and it has now become an integral part of our day to day life. With mobile being in the centre of our daily lives, mobile apps have now become our primary tool to do everyday tasks. We have seen apps replacing many of our gadgets that were once separated into individual devices. In the past decade, we have seen mobile apps and web becoming main medium for fetching information, socialising with friends and relatives, entertainment as well as our work.

In recent years, we have now seen a wave of apps becoming smarter than ever. Apps are now connecting with technologies to surpass their potential and become more useful everyday. Apps like Google Now feeds you with personalised information that was once easily forgotten and hard to find. Fitness apps are helping to monitor and prevent health problems by flagging risks and giving insight in our daily routines. 

When most useful apps are becoming smarter everyday, there is a divide that is being created between apps that are smarter, faster and better vs apps that just does what a web and desktop were able to achieve a decade ago. After being in apps industry for more than a decade, I am noticing this divide more than ever and companies are struggling to evolve their apps past this barrier risking their apps to obsolete or loosing revenue.

Have you recently seen an app and felt that it doesn't do anything more than its web counter part? What apps do you use the most in your daily life against what are the apps that you would first uninstall when your phone becomes slow or you run out of memory? Yes, we all have our usual suspects. We all have our personalised junkyard of apps that we keep just because we didn't bother to uninstall.

As a consumer we are very picky about what apps we would use and the ones we would uninstall as soon as we get a chance. But as owners of an app, we often tend to fail in criticising our own mistakes. Having an app is not just another channel to reach your customer, but it is an opportunity to make your clients love your product and become their favourite brand. Mobile devices can give you much more user engagement if it is executed correctly.

Apps are now evolving from single app experience to on demand, modular and always available. For example, quick reply that we do from a chat notification or quick actions done using Siri or Google Assistant? When was the lat time you called a call centre and was answered directly by a person? Chatbots are becoming more and more common. Remember video floating above your other apps or the floating navigation? Many of you would have used mobile payment by just authorising it using fingerprint or take photo by quick launching a camera.

However on the far side, there are more apps everyday that feel obsolete in this race of becoming smart, agile and connected everyday. With so many talks about cutting edge technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Internet of Things, it's hard to figure how traditional apps can evolve with these technologies in a strategic and incremental way. Luckily lot's of these technologies can be utilised as add ons. With a strategic plan, apps can transit to be smarter and more productive, giving competitive advantage to the business.

ChatBot is a classic example of one such method. Many apps are utilising it to automate preliminary customer service and taking advantage of technology to be more useful in a humanised way. Location aware apps are well known, but there are very few apps that utilise that information effectively to change its behaviour and be more useful for its customers. Mobile payments have seen rise in past few years and is predicted to evolve stronger than ever to help user in getting rid of fat wallets they carry around. Apps are making use of Bluetooth, Wifi and other form of sensors to become more contextual and provide on demand services.

We at xEnabler are currently helping out clients to do an assessment of how their apps can create a strategic pathway to evolve into Next Generation apps. Feel free to reach out to us for an assessment of your app and how it can evolve as well.

- Prashant Gami