Will the app take over the world?
It all started on two small platforms, the iPhone and Touch, and it is a very small word indeed, but at least for some people, the app is taking over the world and helping to shape a new mobile social paradigm.
Take it from Matt Murphy, who manages the iFund (a part of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), which provides seed money to iPhone-specific app developers. Murphy says, “The sea change here is that people are gradually moving away from spending time with TV and computers to their mobile devices. And that mobile time is increasingly less about talking and all about apps. … There will be no slowing this app economy. Apps enrich our lives in ways specific to who we are. Look for the current app snacks we have on our iPhones to turn into a meal on the iPad as the app experiences become far more immersive.”
It seems there is an app for everything, especially in Apple’s App Store. There are, after all, more than 100,000 apps in the App Store now: games, productivity programs, hobby helpers, computing tools, and everything else you can imagine. Moreover, people are spending a lot of their time with these little mobile programs. According to a recent survey conducted by Morgan Stanley, iPhone users spend about an hour a day using their phone, fully 1/24th of their lives. Of that hour, more than half of the time is spent doing something other than talking on the phone, which is to say interacting with apps.
Mobile apps are moving into the mainstream even faster than computer applications did at the beginning of the personal computer revolution. Apple is selling millions of iPhones per year. RIM Blackberry and Nokia are doing the same, and Android phones are off to a fast start. Two years ago, very few people knew what an app was. Today, there are stories in mainstream newspapers about how important they are. Soon, smartphones will be joined by tablet computers like the iPad, which will also run the ubiquitous app. We seem to be moving form the PC and television to the smartphone for more and more of our lives. Given time, apps may indeed conquer the world.
Related posts:
