More than one-third of the global population has access to mobile applicationslications, comprising a staggering of 4 billion people. The most amazing part though; out of the 4 billion applications users worldwide, 1.441 billion is contributed by the Asia Pacific region (almost 36%).
So how much time do people spend on applicationslications? According to the study conducted by Flurry Analytics, consumers spend a whopping 5 hours per day on mobile devices, the majority of which is spent on applications (nearly 90 per cent).
With four million applications on the Applications and Google Stores combined, only 36 applications are being installed by a regular user; and just 26 are being regularly used. All these numbers suggest that due to the availability of mobile data solutions we are way too much dependent on a select few applications for our day-to-day activities.
Millennials spend the majority of their time on applications, starting from opening their email and chat applications very first in the morning. The usage continues with putting on music through streaming applications, calling for a ride, and checking the social media updates. Such is the glory of mobile applications now!
The year 2017 saw some new trends in applications with the rise in on-demand applications, augmented reality/virtual reality applications, mobile payments, iot + wearables applications and so on. Here is what we saw in some of the most promising applications of 2017.
Facebook no info on updates for any of these is required. Figure out the number of users and how much time was spent on the platform and doing what.
Facebook has always been ahead of the game when it comes to experimenting with new ideas and providing a better user experience. With updates and expansions in mind and increase in mobile data solutions, Facebook saw the following trends in 2017:
Astounding 500 million users watch an average of 100 million hours of video every day. The live video trend launched in 2017 prompted many exciting ways to find, create, share, and react to them. Brands were also seen adding a video element to carousel ads for promoting their products along with ‘Facebook Stories’ being creatively employed to connect with their customers.
Out of 2 billion users, 1.50 billion people on average log onto Facebook daily and are considered daily active users (Statista). Facebook saw mobile optimisation with Facebook Lite, and Messenger Lite meant to tap the mobile segments of emerging economies with slower internet connections.
With more than 60 million businesses onboard, ‘Messenger Platform 2.0’ was introduced with the aim to enhance customer experience. The ‘discover section’ was added to allow businesses to customise a chatbot according to their requirements and needs.
Use of advanced marketing analytics using Page interactions, Facebook Workplace, Facebook Marketplace and Multi-Product Dynamic Ads were on the rise in 2017.
Used by over 1.3 billion people worldwide and 200 million in India alone, WhatsAppis the most widespread messaging applications in the world. The following updates made WhatsApp more popular in 2017:
WhatsApp most important updates this year, the new ‘Status’ feature was introduced in February, allowing users to change their status by adding multiple photos or a short video which automatically disappears in 24 hours.
WhatsApp being one of the primary platforms for media sharing, increase in the media sharing limit to 30 was a welcome change by users all over.
The ‘Revoke’ feature has allowed users to recall or unsend the messages that have been sent to their contacts. The ‘Two-step verification’ feature which rolled out in February allowed users to more securely verify their number while installing the applications on a new device.
While still dwarfed by Facebook’s social networks, including the core Facebook applications, Messenger, and WhatsApp; Twitter notably has a crucial place among the world’s top social networks with 330 million monthly active users.
This June, Twitter redesigned its desktop site and mobile applications to make Twitter lighter, faster, and easier to use. These UI and UX innovations were aimed to attract people to Twitter, and prevent existing users from leaving it.
Twitter has begun to respond to threats and harassment and has introduced series of features aimed to keep people safe, like notification filtering, mute option, reporting transparency, safe search, hiding abusive tweets, and preventing new abuse.
YouTube
For millions of creators, YouTube isn’t just a creative outlet; it’s a source of income. With 1.5 billion logged-in monthly users watching tons of mobile video, YouTube has gained popularity due to the following factors:
- SEO related edge given by Google to YouTube videos
- A channel to make millions of dollars in revenue from Google AdSense ads displayed on the videos
- A channel for promoting the products
In April 2017, YouTube introduced ‘Expanded YouTube Partner Program (YPP) Safeguards’ to protect creators, wherein ads on YPP videos will not be served until the channel reaches 10k lifetime views.
The way forward
Augmented reality and virtual reality applications will slowly invade more of our lives including applications in real estate, fashion, and retail to woo customers.
Progressive applications will make a significant impact in the future. Users could just make use of progressive applications at once, as the bridge between the internet experience and native applications functionality.
Mobile applicationss have started leveraging IoT and going forward, IoT will allow mobile applicationss to connect with more devices and more customers to enable data collection and contribute to improving the standard of life.
By using location-based services or geofencing software, users will get an alert about the nearby businesses.
With an expected increase to USD 98.03 billion in 2021 for enterprise applications market, micro-applications with features like lightweight, targeted, HTML, and ad-hoc-based, will continue to see a push in future.
Conclusion:
In 2017, we saw a lot of interesting stuff happening in the applications arena due to rise in mobile data solutions. There is no doubt that mobile applications will turnaround our dependencies in the coming future, well, that’s the beauty of technology, isn’t it?
Despite stiff competition in the industry, the applications market will leverage new monetisation methods and useful solutions for users. It will continue to generate higher revenue in the foreseeable future. The applications revolution is just beginning!
