App Annie has released its annual report on the global app landscape in 2017. It tells a tale about how we use our phones as the means by which we pretty much do everything.
The report can be downloaded in exchange for the usual personal details but the the headlines are pretty pithy without the download. Ones that caught my attention include:
- 60% growth in the number of app downloads globally which equates to 175 billion downloads
- consumer spend has more than doubled to USD86 billion
- time spent in apps spiked by 30% – a user now spends around 43 days of their year in apps
- the average user has around 80 apps on their phone and uses about 40 of them a month
- China is the biggest user of apps across all markets and $1 out of every $4 dollars generated via apps comes the Chinese market
These figures are bound to make a lot of people very ‘appy indeed (sorry, hard to resist).
Like most consumers, I prefer using an app to almost any other kind of software. The simplicity and immediacy are seductive user experiences and usually far better designed than desktop equivalents. When will corporate software catch up? So many organisations are still operating legacy ERP systems with user experiences written when Ferris Bueller was having his day off. But it cannot be long before employees begin to demand more intuitive design experiences of their corporate software.
This report gives me hope that the pressure is building.