Apps or nothing?

A decade ago, I bought my first smartphone. It was large, heavy and had a terribly tiny screen claiming to have internet capabilities. It took anything between two and three minutes to open a simple web page. But I loved it. It gave me an overview of the happenings of the world and I knew that this portable device would achieve miracles. For someone who has grown up with the tring-tring telephone, the cellular device was a thing of wonder.

Today, mobiles have large screens with high-resolution displays and intuitive user interfaces. India has the second highest number of mobile phone users in the world, next only to China. A little more than half of India browses the internet through its mobile phone.

In India, the smartphone is the first window into the internet. Despite mobile’s prominence in India, the infrastructure has some gaping holes. A little more than 10 per cent of telecom towers is equipped with 3G connections and even this is restricted to urban areas. Naturally, mobile web is slow and clunky. A personal computer needs its browsers — it is the only outlet to the internet. But mobile is different. In mobile, browsers are secondary and ‘applications’ are the internet.

To understand the nature of apps and what they offer, Indian e-commerce is a stellar example. If numbers are anything to go by, mobile apps have already taken Indian e-commerce by storm. In a recently published report, Vizury found that downloads of e-commerce apps in India grew 31 per cent compared with last year. One could argue that this can be attributed to special offers on apps, but there’s no denying that apps offer a superior customer experience.

With the focus on reaching some of the most remote parts of India, browsing speeds on apps are far better than mobile web pages. Mobile web is slow, hogs far more data and is incredibly cumbersome. As a matter of fact, every time a user wants to check a new image of a product, the page needs to reload all over again. Some e-commerce companies have coded better and offer revolving carousels, but clicking on the image means a new page has to download. In short, shopping on mobile web is a tedious process — one that does not favour low internet speed.

According to our research, sales through apps have more than doubled — about 80 per cent of customers used mobile apps to buy products, compared to about 40 per cent last year. There’s no denying the massive shift to apps. Mobile applications maintain a pre-loaded user experience that remains largely unaffected by internet speeds. Combine this with the ability to save more data locally and apps offer a much smoother and faster experience.

There was a hue and cry when online retailer Myntra declared war on desktop browsing. The app-only model has significantly picked up since then. But should you eliminate all options in favour of your app? Everybody offers steeper discounts on apps as compared to web. So, in essence, there’s no denying that companies want to direct traffic from the web to the app. You can offer a greater level of personalisation on an app as compared to desktop web or mobile web. But how?

The mobile is an extremely personal device. Tapping into the numerous sensors in modern smartphones provides companies with a treasure trove of data about the individual customer’s behaviours and interests. These sensors also augment the experience of shopping for the customers. This rich flow of data is unavailable through a traditional desktop where all you can store are cookies. The desktop also tends to be accessed by multiple users, muddling up the data insights.

And the breakaway seems to have been received well by mobile-savvy Indian consumers. On weekends alone, for instance, there is a huge spike of consumers shopping on apps, as Vizury sees. In contrast, mobile web on Sundays draws about the same number of consumers.

With people constantly on the move in today’s fast-paced world, the mobile becomes an ideal travel companion. People are constantly fact-checking, navigating, communicating and entertaining themselves with these gizmos.

The mobile commands a significant amount of attention through the day. Overall, the number of people who end up buying something on mobile apps is 2.5 times higher compared to those who use mobile websites. Is this simply because of better quality of customer impressions? Not necessarily. The mobile phones of today operate in the form of an app ecosystem.

The ability to directly link between apps and transition smoothly from a social media ad to the app that sells the product speeds up the purchase process. Combining personalisation of apps to suit customers and the ability to capture and insert one-time passwords (OTPs) for online transactions brings the entire purchase process down to two clicks. Ease of use dominates the mobile ecosystem.

Does this mean every company should jump onto the app-only bandwagon? There are businesses that truly have great benefit for the app-only model. For example, it’s really not worth having a full-service website for Ola, a cab hailing company. Cab hailing services depend heavily on GPS sensors for seamless operation. Putting this together with the ‘on-the-go’ nature of the business, a full-service website becomes redundant.

Would a consumer see value in the mobile nature of your app? Is it an essential service that adds daily value? Should exclusivity be a key positioning of the company? All important questions to be considered before developing an app. So one must decide: how much of your business model relies on the unique capabilities of smartphones?

Not every company or business model is suited for the app-only model. But today, being present in mobile alongside other channels is a must for all e-businesses.

The benefits of apps are several, but the potential they hold is massive. With advances in smartphone technology, apps will definitely become (in some cases, already are) the mainstream channel.

But just like e-books, it may never eliminate the traditional formats. For, no matter how many e-readers companies thrust on us, there is no pleasure like curling up with a good old-fashioned paperback.

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