Apps are Winning the War on Mobile

Last year about this time I, like many others, was convinced that the dominance of apps would give start to give way to mobile web over time. The app market is WAY over saturated with apps that don’t actually provide content or an experience specifically tailored to mobile. I believed that as more and more companies built websites optimized for mobile devices (either responsive or dedicated sites), users would learn that they could just visit the site instead of having to go through the process of downloading the app which would take up precious home screen real estate.

Well, folks, so far that doesn’t seem to be the case. A new report from mobile analytics company Flurry shows mobile users are increasingly turning to apps. This TechCrunch article does a great job elaborating on the original post:

“…users are now spending 2 hours and 42 minutes per day on mobile devices as of March 2014, up from 2 hours, 38 minutes as of a year ago. Meanwhile, mobile app usage accounts for 2 hours and 19 minutes of that time spent, while mobile web usage has dropped from 20% of the U.S. consumer’s time in 2013 to just 14% – or 22 minutes per day – as of last month”

Want more? Take a pick from these other fine sources covering this topic:

I still think that it’s possible that the pendulum swings back to mobile web as mobile website quality gets better and mobile device connection speeds get faster, but for now you have to have an app in the market.