the hype that messaging and/or "bots" will negate the need for Apps, and that Apple's App Store business is yesterday's newspaper. That the mobile OS is going to be quickly irrelevant, and it will be the messaging platform (or other higher stack "platform") that will rule all.
What is going to replace the Apps that people use on their phones? Does it make sense to build an application on a "messaging platform" to watch a video, purchase physical goods, or play a game (like the TechCrunch graphic shows)? What does "messaging as a platform" really mean?
Everyone likes to talk about what "could be", and discount as worthless going forward what is here & working.
The TechCrunch article the graphic links to talks about the idea of bots replacing apps with the following statement:
"messaging apps are becoming the new platform, subsuming the role played by the mobile operating system. This is similar to the trend in the mid ‘90s, when the browser replaced the desktop OS as the new platform. Just as websites replaced client applications then, messaging bots will replace mobile apps now. Bots, therefore, are the new apps. The bot store is the new app store."
As you say, everybody tries to come up with whatever the 'next big thing' is going to be but it's usually some half-baked conjecture. TechCrunch has also been known to push stories that promote their CrunchFund investments. CrunchFund invested in chatbot company x.ai early 2015:
The above statement also misses the fact that apps replaced much of the mobile web because a native experience is better due to having persistent data and fast/fluid response. Bots will be like web apps where non-native code is interpreted on top of a chat app.
There's not much opportunity to monetize bots for the bot provider either. The main use for them is to get away from those irritating touch tone phone answering systems:
Please press 1 if you want to pay a bill, press 2 if you want to check your balance... press 1 Please speak your id... speaks awkwardly to machine Sorry, I didn't get that, please type your account number followed by hash... types 12-digit account number Sorry, that number isn't recognized, please type your account number followed by hash... types 12-digits more slowly Please hold the line while we connect you to an adviser... waits in a queue to eventually reach adviser with an unintelligible accent
Chatbots via messaging can get rid of all that mess and let people settle bills or make enquiries. This saves businesses hiring someone to design and make either a web or native app.
People aren't going to replace many apps with those though. People who want entertainment like movies, games, social interaction aren't going to do this via a chatbot.
There's over 2 million apps in the App Store so it's getting harder for users to find good apps and for developers to get noticed vs the early days of the store when there were fewer apps.
An individual can only look at hundreds of apps so every individual user has never looked at over 1.9 million of those apps (not all the same ones per user) and the apps people do see are heavily weighted towards the App Store front pages. There are ways for Apple to shake this up like give more weight to downloads the lower down an app is ranked so that downloading highly visible apps counts less. This lets lower down apps jump up the ranks quickly but it decelerates the higher it goes. Number of downloads isn't the only metric to use either as good quality apps should come top. No matter the sorting they use, there will still be millions unseen per user, that's just what comes from having millions of apps.
The number of new users to any smartphone platform is going to slow down so software without recurring revenue is going to see revenue fall over time. People will always pay for new entertainment though: new music, movies and games. Developers of utility apps would hook them into services for recurring revenue, developers of entertainment apps either make them addictive or keep making new games.
If Apple had more premium software titles in the store, that would raise quality expectations and condition users to expect to pay for good content. Ubisoft is looking for an investor to help keep Vivendi from taking over the company the way they did with Gameloft:
If Apple raises quality expectations for apps and improves discoverability, the entertainment app purchases will keep the App Store interesting. A discovery page would be helpful where on an iPad for example you see a grid of 16 apps at once, tap a preview to see what an app is about and mark any of interest. It would save the ones of interest and just hit next to get another 16 apps. The ones skipped over would never be seen again in the discovery panel. Someone could easily get through 10 pages of apps at a time. Once a week x 160 apps = over 8000 apps reviewed per year. With narrowing by interest and categories, they'd be showing the best apps for the user.
> While Microsoft's fans crowed about how genius it was to replace icons with Live Tile animations, for app developers it meant something else. Instead of getting a prominently placed iconic ad for their software on users' home screens, begging to be used, they now got their product hidden behind some flashy animated visualization.
...or behind an information-packed rectangle that the user can touch to dive into the app for more details, geeze. Have you ever actually used Live Tiles? Or their Android equivalent of Widgets? They're incredibly useful, and Apple's continued insistence on stuffing these sorts of things into drop down menus instead of letting us decide to dedicate part of our home screens to them is one of the things that bugs me about iOS.
Comments
https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/29/forget-apps-now-the-bots-take-over/
"messaging apps are becoming the new platform, subsuming the role played by the mobile operating system. This is similar to the trend in the mid ‘90s, when the browser replaced the desktop OS as the new platform. Just as websites replaced client applications then, messaging bots will replace mobile apps now. Bots, therefore, are the new apps. The bot store is the new app store."
As you say, everybody tries to come up with whatever the 'next big thing' is going to be but it's usually some half-baked conjecture. TechCrunch has also been known to push stories that promote their CrunchFund investments. CrunchFund invested in chatbot company x.ai early 2015:
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/x-ai#/entity
The above statement also misses the fact that apps replaced much of the mobile web because a native experience is better due to having persistent data and fast/fluid response. Bots will be like web apps where non-native code is interpreted on top of a chat app.
There's not much opportunity to monetize bots for the bot provider either. The main use for them is to get away from those irritating touch tone phone answering systems:
Please press 1 if you want to pay a bill, press 2 if you want to check your balance... press 1
Please speak your id... speaks awkwardly to machine
Sorry, I didn't get that, please type your account number followed by hash... types 12-digit account number
Sorry, that number isn't recognized, please type your account number followed by hash... types 12-digits more slowly
Please hold the line while we connect you to an adviser... waits in a queue to eventually reach adviser with an unintelligible accent
Chatbots via messaging can get rid of all that mess and let people settle bills or make enquiries. This saves businesses hiring someone to design and make either a web or native app.
People aren't going to replace many apps with those though. People who want entertainment like movies, games, social interaction aren't going to do this via a chatbot.
There's over 2 million apps in the App Store so it's getting harder for users to find good apps and for developers to get noticed vs the early days of the store when there were fewer apps.
http://www.statista.com/statistics/268251/number-of-apps-in-the-itunes-app-store-since-2008/
An individual can only look at hundreds of apps so every individual user has never looked at over 1.9 million of those apps (not all the same ones per user) and the apps people do see are heavily weighted towards the App Store front pages. There are ways for Apple to shake this up like give more weight to downloads the lower down an app is ranked so that downloading highly visible apps counts less. This lets lower down apps jump up the ranks quickly but it decelerates the higher it goes. Number of downloads isn't the only metric to use either as good quality apps should come top. No matter the sorting they use, there will still be millions unseen per user, that's just what comes from having millions of apps.
The number of new users to any smartphone platform is going to slow down so software without recurring revenue is going to see revenue fall over time. People will always pay for new entertainment though: new music, movies and games. Developers of utility apps would hook them into services for recurring revenue, developers of entertainment apps either make them addictive or keep making new games.
If Apple had more premium software titles in the store, that would raise quality expectations and condition users to expect to pay for good content. Ubisoft is looking for an investor to help keep Vivendi from taking over the company the way they did with Gameloft:
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/13/ubisoft-ceo-open-to-a-merger--but-not-with-vivendi.html
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-06-02-gameloft-ceo-to-step-down-vivendi-issues-letter-to-employees
A 25% investment (~$1b) should do it. They can port some of their best games to all Apple's platforms in return (they made Rayman for Apple TV):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubisoft_games
If Apple raises quality expectations for apps and improves discoverability, the entertainment app purchases will keep the App Store interesting. A discovery page would be helpful where on an iPad for example you see a grid of 16 apps at once, tap a preview to see what an app is about and mark any of interest. It would save the ones of interest and just hit next to get another 16 apps. The ones skipped over would never be seen again in the discovery panel. Someone could easily get through 10 pages of apps at a time. Once a week x 160 apps = over 8000 apps reviewed per year. With narrowing by interest and categories, they'd be showing the best apps for the user.