I stopped downloading apps because, first and foremost, they enabled every stupid little company to access my notifications bar. Now every stupid little marketing droid is sending me stupid chipper messages about whatever stupid thing they think I should care about.
Yes I can turn them off. No I should not have to. These people should respect other peoples' space.
And it's gotten worse! If polluting the notifications bar isn't pathetic enough, Facebook now begs you to "help thousands of users" with a review in-app. Windows 10 lockscreen is begging me to try Cortana. EVEN MY F@%#! camera app does this now!! STOP TELLING ME WHAT TO DO ASSHOLES!
Oh boy, I forgot just how much of a problem this was on Android. I've been using an iPhone for a little over a year now and it seems to be dramatically better in Apple's ecosystem for some reason. This post brought back nightmares where I'd check my Android phone and have 10+ notifications that were 100% spam.
1. what kind of shady apps were you installing? What you describe is against Google ToS and results in a ban from the store.
2. long press on the notification to see what app sent it, then press to disable any further notifications from that app (or better yet, give it 1-start and uninstall it).
sincerely,
a windows phone user
(edit: my comment is down-voted for stating how Android works??)
I think notifications are off on iOS by default, and the first time you launch the app, it asks you "[App] wants to send you notifications" and you have to explicitly allow it. Same thing with accessing your contacts/calendar and stuff.
A big reason I switched to iOS is that Apple cares about letting me control what runs on my phone and how much apps can nag me and what they can access. Google does not care about this at all and it's reminiscent of the huge risk of downloading anything on a PC. That's exactly what I'm trying to get away from on the phone.
Funny, I switched to Android because Apple exerted complete control over what software I could run on my phone, to the extent that I can only run the apps they allow me to, but I get your point.
I guess I decided that Google's BS was a little more palatable than Apple's BS.
Unless you are some sort of app reviewer and install hundreds of apps I would say the Google method is better. You get notifications served by default and its a quick long press right in the notification bar to mute all future notifications if needed. Apple wants you to make this decision early on when often I don't even know what type of notifications an app serves.
I think Android 6 changed this to make users granting permissions explicitly when running app. But, it might take years for phones and apps to upgrade to android 6.
Hmm. I could swear since upgrading recently that I've been asked whether an app can send me notifications. Could be wrong , I have a large mishmash of Android and iOS devices lying around the house.
protip: don't use google play for apps. Only download apps via F-DROID, which only provides open-source apps and removes "anti-features" (or explicitly warns about them in a prompt before installing).
Yelp is so annoying on this front. Click on a review and you have to scroll past a full page suggestion to open it in their app. Then to read reviews they have a "Read more reviews" button, but if you click that it takes you to the app store to install their app. If you click "close" you can actually read reviews.
Yelp is now in the position where I won't even visit their site, but only scan previews from maps/google/etc. So they went from showing me an apparently low value web ad to showing me no ads.
Yes, it is horrible. I have started to populate and use Google Reviews for this reason. If I am desperate enough to need to read Yelp reviews on my phone, I enable 'Desktop Mode' and then Yelp shows the reviews without trying to coerce me into installing their app. So sad.
News sites in particular are big offenders. I don't need a new app for every two-bit small town newspaper. I have a couple of major ones (WSJ, FT), but if you think I'm going to install the app for your minor newspaper because Google News linked it ...
These are definitely some of the worst. Small-time news sites all push some wretched app they bought off a CDN, and any niche tech news site feels unimportant if it doesn't push an app on every visitor.
Meanwhile I have BBC's rather pleasant news app, and consume my other news in-browser or off-phone.
So, while I agree with you: do they care I you read the article? They probably don't make any money off of you at all: you are just a waste of their resources. Actual local customers might be slightly more interested in their app, and the app may be something that massively ups their revenue in some indirect way.
I have to wonder if it's worthwhile though. Aren't they also chasing away a lot of potential local readers? If there's two or three local news options in my locality, I'm going to settle on the one that's least annoying. I don't disagree with your proposed logic, but I think they're mistaken in believing that only non locals will bounce.
Similarly, the recent-ish trend of "open in app" buttons that obscure the content drive me crazy. Imgur does this. It's already open in my app, I prefer my browser as the "app", thanks.
My personal favourite is facebook chat. Mobile site? "You have to use the app!" Request desktop site? Well well well, it appear to work just fine. Supremely annoying the one time a month I need to reply to someone's message...
The mobile web isn't a good ux. The reason I use Facebook's mobile web interface is that the Facebook app is too intrusive. The value of Facebook's best ux isn't high enough to justify granting all the app permissions it wants.
Make apps. Make them nice and useful, and not spyware.
Seriously. I don't want to download some garbage app for every website I just want to browse for 3 minutes. Screw Soundcloud in particular.
Imagine if every album required you to use an app specifically for that album. It's basically that annoying. Actually, I probably shouldn't say that; I don't want to give the music industry any ideas.
Retention is very valuable. Having a user install your app is more valuable letting him use mobile web and then be at Google's mercy to see him again.
I have several niche apps that are installed by only 12% of people who visit the mobile page but those 12% people generate much more revenue than the 100% of mobile web.
> Is it too much to hope that companies get the hint and fully embrace the mobile web?
It's cute you think the mobile web doesn't have spam on it. Also, companies don't embrace the mobile web because nobody uses the mobile web. It's too slow and unresponsive compared to native apps.
I know this is anecdata, but honestly at this point I'm a negative datapoint for them: I am slowly deleting more and more apps off my phone as the months go on. Mobile gaming never worked out for me (it's all terrible all the time) and honestly, my phone is for maps and talking to friends, all of which I can do in 2-3 apps. The rest is just a slow accumulation of junk I realise I don't care about.
I recently deleted dozens of apps off my Android phone. After years of using the phone as intended, a month ago I started getting full screen ads, some with video and sound. They start whenever they want, even if I am using the launcher or the phone is locked. So I reset the phone to factory defaults and only took back a few apps. I don't really need them.
So funny you should mention yelp, I just deleted it a week or so ago. I realised I didn't actually use it really much at all, and honestly if I'm out and about (and so am not planning on my computer) I'm perfectly happy to just chance it at a random place than try to over-analyse and pick the optimal meal at the optimal place to eat.
"ComScore’s Andrew Lipsman says it’s more a reflection that his company has improved its methodology since then — rather than any drastic changes in the app economy"
I wonder what their methodology is? Their first attempt was off by a large margin if it went from 33% to 49%.
I don't find this statistic all that shocking; downloading one app a month on average is actually quite a lot. Nearly 40% of users download 2 or more! I'm not sure what a "healthy" amount of app downloads would be if this isn't it -- at some point users are limited by the storage of their devices and their attention span.
Once you downloaded all the apps that you need, it is not hard to believe that you would then download only 1 application every 3 months, or even less often (rounded off makes it 0 apps per month).
I have ~30 apps that cover maybe 80% of what I want to do with my phone. I can do another ~18% via mobile web, which covers the one-off tasks that I don't want to download an app (with attendant privacy horrors) to complete.
The rest, I download new apps for. Which, as you say, is a handful a year. It's probably more than 4, but most of those are things I'm trying and then promptly uninstall when they're awful. I get why this is drama from a business standpoint, but from a user standpoint it just means that there aren't many things so appealing I download an app to complete them.
"Android developer" is one of the hats I wear, so I'm instinctively drawn to the "app version" of something. I have dozens of apps I find "essential" and use regularly. But yes, that list has remained mostly constant over the years (at least on my phone; games on my tablet are an exception to this pattern) as different apps and services have fulfilled my essential functions reliably.
I've recently switched quite some apps for a shortcut to a mobile site, because they just run a background service using some Google shit I don't use (AndroidWearSync - Todoist&Wunderlist, GoogleNowAuth - Strava). Getting rid of the app and using the website/finding an alternative liberates my device.
Most apps aren't worth downloading. Once you get pass the initial excitement of owning your first smartphone, downloading an app that's just a wrapper for a website isn't worth the time.
That's just it: apps that are just wrappers for a website are never worth the time, yet they are so very common just to say "we have an app!" Actual apps are great, though.
I think the app extensions are an attempt to drive app usage. For example, in iOS 10, you can easily get data from various apps to send in a message to someone. Google Now cards are increasingly coming from third-party apps. You can't do those things with the mobile web.
Using your thumb print for a password on bank apps is like aaahhhhhhhh thank god why didn't this happen earlier. And remote check deposits omfg woooooooo! But you are right for at least 75% of apps.
Open app...
Switch to 1PW keyboard...
Manually entered long vault PW...
Search for site because 1PW doesn't recognize the app for some reason...
Select site...
Click form fields to fill various bits...
Compensatory content: This does seem to be a natural & logical trajectory for this I'm afraid. Or at least for those who don't fetishize technology but rather just want it to do something for them (which is most people, or I guess, about half of people!). As a brand-new smartphone owner you might be downloading & trying different apps all the time, experimenting, searching... but once you've found the "app for that" for every "that" that you want to do, you're pretty much set. You just maybe dutifully download updates. But even there, you're hoping they don't irrevocably change something you like, and in my case on Android I'm ready with an adb backup to roll back to the previous version.
As a solo developer, it's hard for me to gauge exactly where we are on the 'app' technology trajectory. My enthusiasm for any native mobile endeavour is pretty much shot by now. So, so much work for such little payoff.
Most folks I know will use the 'Big Four' apps for social - Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and to a lesser extent Twitter. Anything else gets googled. So what opportunity is left? I have no idea - maybe a big one. I can't tell at this point. I don't use apps. The thing is, I wonder if this pessimism existed towards the web in its early days, which obviously turned out to be a huge opportunity for those that didn't dismiss it when things were rough (Browser wars, IE, Web 1.0).
The web had much more organic growth than apps. Apps have pretty much been rammed down our throats by personal-information-seeking marketroids. Initially, the web didn't promise to be a solution to anything, just a large bazaar of occasionally useful and/or interesting information.
Things were not that bad back then. The worst thing of the early web was that any practical web browser had to process broken HTML the same way that Netscape Navigator 3 did.
Microsoft had the resources to reverse engineer that behavior, and then they designed CSS in such a way that it could not be implemented on the Netscape rendering engine without wrecking it.
Mozilla finally caught up, then eventually the undocumented behavior got documented in HTML 5 and it is all roses now.
I was going to say that they want unlimited access to my contacts, my location, my web history, my calls and my network traffic. But "root access" is a more succinct way to put it. I'm glad, actually, that people are growing stingy about installing apps, because it means they are getting smart about protecting their digital assets.
That's because they're useless for 80% of the stuff I do. If I'm looking at the weather, I don't need a weather app. You can get my location from my browser you can show me everything there. Why do I need to download?
Pinterest? Same thing.
Tumblr? Same
Why do I need apps to do these things. Sometimes apps are handy but I will find them if I need them. You forcing me to use them does nothing but make me find somewhere else to visit!
My mother, father, wife, and mother-in-law all do not know their itunes passwords so they couldn't even download an app even if they tried. They probably tried once, got frustrated, and gave up forever. I am sure this is a significant portion of the "problem".
This also leads to the frustrating circle-
Website wants me to install app, OK. But I can't install the app. But website won't show me the content without installing installing the app!
Argh!
If we included all the uninstalls that people do (or try to do) of of the bloatware that comes installed with phones, I wonder if we'd hit a negative number.
Even worse, a "stock" Lenovo K3 Note comes with an unbelievable amount of crap (not surprising to those that followed the Superfish fiasco) - the hardware itself is pretty good and unbeatable at the price point (maybe they subsidize the phone with all that adware?).
The mobile gaming trend is terrible. Even some of the nicer game apps (like "two dots") are becoming blatant Skinner box slot machines. The sole purpose of the mechanics and design is to draw you in, keep you coming back, and subtly suggest endless creative ways of "paying to win". It's disgusting.
I know they are between and a rock and a hard place in terms of actually making any money, but I honestly would rather have zero mobile games than the current adversarial and manipulative ones.
What's the breakdown by platform? Also I wasn't impressed that it took 3 clicks to eventually try and reach Comscore's data only to find out you need to signup for it.
Right. I don't even have Google's store installed on my phone. Just F-Droid, for free software, ZANavi, for GPS, and Firefox. I use only about 50-100MB of data per month.
A huge number of apps exist, it seems, either to get hooks into you in some way, or just to exist because someone up the chain said, "We need an app."
To be honest, nothing reminds me so much of the atmosphere around the 80's videogame crash as much as apps today. It's easier, and frankly more rewarding not to play that game at all, than to try and sift through the mess.
My experience with apps is that they're active when you're not using them, they slow everything down, and they drain battery; not to mention how many of them want to violate your personal information just short of knowing the size of your last dump.
Essentially most apps are malware with a bright coat of "legitimate" colored paint.
Hint Hint, this might just be intentional. I've been using Youtube.com over the YouTube app because the crazy app crashes all the time and I get frustrated with it popping up as my default app for playing back youtube videos. I need to get around to changing that setting, might just be today.
I also use the gmail mobile web site instead of the gmail app, because the web site is fine and it gives me more control over battery and network usage than the native application. Same goes for google calendar.
I don't want to give anybody any ideas, but the only way to get me to use these specific apps would be to kill off the web versions.
Cool tip, I'm going to have to try that out for the browser and see if Chrome let's me fly or sink. I can't remember if it was the app or the browser that sunk on this usability.
I don't use many apps either, in fact I have uninstalled several because the updates are a bit of a burden. I know why they exist and am grateful, but if I haven't opened say "go to meeting" in nine months, I don't need it updated every month etc.
I already downloaded all the apps I ever needed - about 10 on the phone (Android) and a similar number on the iPad. I see no reason to install more - I have no need and no interest. So a bright developer created an app - what about it? It does not mean I need it.
I have a bunch of apps I use all the time and when buying a new phone I just install those; I never look for anything new. There might be better apps for some of the things I'm doing but I cannot find them and i'm not going to try all apps out... Most people I know have the same behavior. Why look for other apps if you can already do all you need? That said; I use my phone far more than my laptop for work and I do miss apps which other people do not seem to miss which, I guess, I should make some time. I do search for those every few months and if something would pop up I would download it.
150 million US Smartphone Users Are Downloading Apps, Data Shows
At some point (already?) there will be so many smartphone users that even if only 50% of smartphone users download apps then smartphone apps will be bigger than almost anything else.
I was working in an App which builds Apps to local businesses. When it was ready, I realized that local businesses don't need an App at all. It was a f* moment. So I pivoted the App to build websites too, which makes much more sense to local businesses. I wish I had have this realization earlier.
I don't like apps for websites that work well in the browser.
Games do not work in mobile browsers, so those I may download (but I don't really play games).
Apps such as Facebook and Snapchat waste battery and attempt to datamine.
I try to keep my phone down to as little apps as possible because I hate rogue battery use and data mining, but many apps choose to ignore those wishes.
If google play services wasn't required for some apps that I would try, I wouldn't have them installed.
Yes I can turn them off. No I should not have to. These people should respect other peoples' space.
And it's gotten worse! If polluting the notifications bar isn't pathetic enough, Facebook now begs you to "help thousands of users" with a review in-app. Windows 10 lockscreen is begging me to try Cortana. EVEN MY F@%#! camera app does this now!! STOP TELLING ME WHAT TO DO ASSHOLES!