The fake love for apps

To make an app or a web app? Usually, this question is brought to the table every time we explain to our clients the type of digital products we build. The concept or idea of having their app makes them believe it is the best solution cause of the power of just saying Hey download my app, or do this in my app, but the reality is that in 2025 (three years from now) the use and download of apps will reduce by 10% getting lower every year.

Let’s see why we say this from the users' point of view and as digital product creators. There are around 9 million apps only on Google Play, 2.5 million on Apple Store, and 700.000 on Windows. How will your app differentiate from big direct and indirect competitors? And as users, what app will be sufficient to satisfy our needs? From these questions, the situation starts getting blurred.

Then, data analysis has shown that for a user to have engagement with an app, it takes less than 3 seconds, which means only ⅓ of users leave the app on their phones, turning the success rate for apps to only 10% in their first six months.

The overview gets darker, plus the user experience isn’t the best. The problem with apps is that they are digital products that are static and need upgrades to expand, the construction of each phase of the product is limited and normally they aren’t cloud-based integrated. Meaning that all interactions and data are captured in the app but it doesn’t allow integration with web services.

Have you noticed, when using or doing a process inside an app, that when you do an interaction, the app redirects you to a web page and all the data and journey have to be done again? This is an example of having a closed system. This affects the user experience going from site to site and going through the same process more than once because the app is closed.

That's the reason super apps have reached unicorn status so quickly is that even though they are apps, they have integrated and developed all the necessary interactions inside the app to have the best experience. Also, the Games and Social Media industry, has a good reaction to apps, because they are built for one type of interaction that doesn’t need to send the user to different sites.

Our advice, if you want to have your app, study the idea well, make a complete user journey and make a strategy of the product based on a specific problem that needs a solution that can be solved in a fluent digital process inside the app.