Analytics show that “Mobile Apps Put the Web in the Rear-view Mirror”

by Donovan Creative in DONOVAN WORLD, STRATEGY, TECHNOLOGY

21

Jun
2011

FILED UNDER

In 2011, for the first time ever, analytics show that mobile usage has surpassed Internet usage. Also sales of smartphones, iPhones, Tablets and iPads have surpassed (source: Mary Meeker, KPCB, see slide 7) desktop and notebook shipments. If you’re not tweaking your brand or product for mobile usage now, you might be left in the dust. It’s moving that fast.

Analytics experts Flurry Analytics used 500 million (anonymous) use sessions across 85,000 apps, which they surmised would equal one-third of all mobile activity, and scaled up appropriately. Here’s what they found out happened within the last year.

The average user now spends 9% more time using mobile native apps than similar products on the web, and that includes the open web, Facebook, Twitter, other social media, and the mobile web.

The growth is in the number of sessions, meaning that people aren’t going to their desktop computers or laptops to get online. They’re using iPads, tablets, and smartphones.

The breakdown in mobile app usage from the same data is as follows:

The real change, and we predict it to transformational, will be this September when Apple rolls out the Apple Cloud, when every iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad will have access to a user’s desktop data in his or her hands. Facebook is trying to counter that now with its Project Spartan, which it intends to run on top of the Apple Safari browser, but Facebook is aligned with Microsoft’s own cloud project (and WIN PC sales are waay down) and Microsoft sales of Windows 7 smartphones are not only abysmal: they’re almost non-existent. Android apps, also, are a hoary mess at the moment, with some apps working on some Android platforms, while not working on others.

The research firm, In-Stat, forecasts there will be 48 billion app downloads by 2015, and state, “apps already challenge the television in terms of reach and the Internet in terms of engagement.” But considering how these analysts woefully underestimated the effect of the iPad in 2010 and what is happening now, that figure might be reached within a year. Take a look at the hardware figures. Wrap your head around that.