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In just over five years since the launch of the Apple AppStore, apps have taken the mobile industry by storm. Today, 86 per cent of time spent on mobile devices is spent inside applications, with just 14 per cent left for the mobile web. App discovery has been a major challenge over the past five years. In fact, Marketers are expected to spend over $2.4 billion in the US alone to get their apps noticed.
Discovering relevant content and services within apps has also been a big challenge. As an example, if a consumer is searching for a flight to Las Vegas, in an ideal scenario the phone or discovery service would launch whatever flight booking app is installed on the phone and send the consumer directly to the reservations page. But apps (alongside the content and services in them) can't be crawled. They are not just about index and links, and hence are hard to "page rank." So it is difficult for a search engine to discover apps and offer consumers an entry point.
The de-facto behaviour on the web is to launch the browser to google.com, type a sentence and be re-directed to content. The de-facto behaviour in mobile is to launch an app (previously installed on the device) and enjoy the comprehensive experience offered within it. You are rarely, if ever, linked out to a mobile webpage from an app or sent to another app. Each experience is essentially an island unto itself, completely reliant on the consumer to come ashore.
The industry and some major mobile players are looking to solve this problem and the battle is raging for the "gateway" for mobile apps, content and services. In short, the Google position for mobile is up for grabs and billions of dollars are at stake.
We have seen a lot of companies, large and small, try to solve this problem: Apple with Siri, Google with Search and Google Now, Facebook with App Install and App Conversion Ads, and myriad others. But recently we have been most intrigued by Android Personalisation apps, also called Launchers, especially after the creation of Facebook's Home and Yahoo's acquisition of Aviate. The majority of these apps offer a personalized homepage for Android, and do some form of app discovery and launch.
While the cumulative reach of these apps is still relatively small (30 million monthly users in the US), the usage growth is eye catching. This data set is telling us something. It is telling us that consumers are eagerly waiting for an innovative service that help them discover apps, content, and services around them in a personalized way.
The author is Simon Khalaf, president and CEO, Flurry. Re-printed with permission. Link: http://blog.flurry.com/bid/109266/Android-Personalization-Apps-The-Battle-for-App-Content-and-Service-Discovery
