I’d like to focus on my prediction of where we’re headed towards in our apps-mobile frenzy mentality. More and more people are using their iPhones, Androids, and other smartphones to go on the Internet.
I looked up the stat to find that 953 million people use smartphones. I thought there would be many less “dumb” phone or regular phone users, but I was wrong with an alarming 6 billion standard phone users. That means there is even more growth in marketing and selling to these conservative, old-timer phone subscribers.
The interesting point is that it is faster and easier to download an app on a smartphone versus web browsing. It is much faster to use your Weather iPhone app for the weekly forecast than go to Google to search for the weather. 3G and 4G networks are just not fast enough as the app. Even if you’re in a Wi-Fi local computer network, the iPhone is just not fast enough to process your Google request. The app’s speed always wins. Hey, I’d rather do a search on one of my iPhone apps than browse on my desktop. Apps nowadays are just so specialized and quick to please with fast results. As an example, for the last four years in India, mobile Internet usage has surpassed desktop Internet usage. Yes, we’re not India, but this is most likely a preview of where we are headed.
Is this good or bad? It’s all good. Wherever and whenever we want to find results, we’ll be able to. We just need to make sure smartphone technology can satisfy our continued need-it-now mentality. Facebook has tried to compete with the app world by plunking down $1 billion to buy out its major app competitor, Instagram. This was really just a defensive move at best as Facebook will really need to popularize a new creative idea instead of buying the competition.
Facebook and Google should be worried where the mobile and app world are headed, and will try to partner with as many app companies as possible to have a better future technology service position. We will probably see more apps being used on desktops and laptops in the future or at least Apple support and Microsoft support will push for that. That way, computers will not be extinct at the expense of the hot mobile and apps market.
