The Zenith of the App

A Pew Research piece on the Future of Apps suggests that they too, shall pass:

Futurist John Smart, founder of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, looks beyond 2020 and sees apps as merely a passing phase in Internet evolution. “Apps are a great intermediate play, a way to scale up functionality of a primitive Web,” he said, “but over time they get outcompeted for all but the most complex platforms by simpler and more standardized alternatives. What will get complex will be the ‘artificial immune systems’ on local machines.

They also had a survey 0f 1,021 Internet experts about which of 2 scenarios they agreed with, these and the outcome is in the diagram above - roughly 2:1 for the Web (see diagram above).

The Pew article points to Wired's Chris Anderson leading the cheers for Apps in their rise up the hype curve in 2010, when they argued that the World Wide Web was “in decline” and “apps” were in ascendance:

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to closed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display…. Because the screens are smaller, such mobile traffic tends to be driven by specialty software, mostly apps, designed for a single purpose. For the sake of the optimized experience on mobile devices, users forgo the general-purpose browser. They use the Net, but not the Web. Fast beats flexible…

This was all inevitable. It is the cycle of capitalism. The story of industrial revolutions, after all, is a story of battles over control. A technology is invented, it spreads, a thousand flowers bloom, and then someone finds a way to own it, locking out others. It happens every time.....

The wide-open Web of peer production, the so-called generative Web where everyone is free to create what they want, continues to thrive, driven by the nonmonetary incentives of expression, attention, reputation, and the like. But the notion of the Web as the ultimate marketplace for digital delivery is now in doubt.

By 2011 the App craze was in full swing:

The boom in mobile connectivity has been accompanied by a boom in innovation and sales of targeted software applications (apps). Apple’s iPhone and its App Store debuted in June 2007; the iPad debuted in April 2010. On March 3, Apple announced that 25 billion apps had been downloaded.4 Similarly, Google’s Android Market hit 10 billion downloads by December 2011, and users have been downloading apps at a rate of 1 billion a month.5

In June 2011, researchers reported that time spent on apps began to outpace time spent on the desktop or mobile Web.6 The change reflected a 91% increase in time spent with apps between June 2010 and June 2011. In December 2011, the technology forecasting firm The Gartner Group predicted, “By 2015 mobile application development projects targeting smartphones and tablets will outnumber native PC projects by a ratio of 4-to-1. Smartphones and tablets represent more than 90% of the new net growth in device adoption for the coming four years.”7 Gartner predicts that 1 billion smartphones will be sold in 2014 – about double the number of PCs it expects will be sold that year.

even Tim Berners Lee was worried, writing in Scientific American that:

“The Web as we know it is being threatened,” adding that it “could be broken into fragmented islands.”

But, we are now starting to see some interesting countertrends - research shows us that App usage declines soon after download, and there is an App 80/20 - most of the Apps downloaded are hardly used at all after a while, so while App usage rises as new users find them, existing users' use declines over time. This is the classic system dynamic of a hype curve, everyting is in the ascendant as users are gained, but as that slows the cycle of people ignoring apps becomes more prevalent and a rapid decline then sets in.

Thus, I must admit I agree with John Stuart, and the 59% who voted for the Web. To me, Apps are just the latest RingTones or Widgets (remember them) - simple functions to make it easy to use simple devices, which are redundant as the next generation of smarter devices come along. These have now passed, and Apps, too, will likely also pass.