Guest post written by Ellen Pack
Ellen Pack is co-founder of appSmitten, an app discovery service for Android and iOS devices.
I recently found myself sitting around a dinner table with a group of old friends spanning ages 35 to 75. One of the hot topics of conversation that crossed the generational divide (other than who had read “Fifty Shades of Grey”) was which apps we had each fallen for lately. With some brandishing smartphones at the dinner table and others having theirs tucked discreetly in a back pocket, I relished being a silent observer. Unbeknownst to this group, I had dedicated the last year to studying app discovery. According to Pew Internet Research, a mere four years after the iPhone was introduced, 42% of adults in the U.S. have smartphones with apps.
What had led apps to be one of the fastest growing and most widely adopted technologies in history? Mobile apps can do the most amazing things for us - they don’t just connect us to other people, they connect us to the world and the appy way of doing things is often more efficient, more social, more personal and frequently more fun.
My obsession with apps had started about a year earlier when a couple of former colleagues and I got together. Although none of us would consider ourselves ‘geeks’, our talk frequently turned to apps - which ones we had discovered and the awesome things they could do for us. At that particular gathering, Anna was talking up GasBuddy, I was raving about Fooducate and Sarah was all over Fancy. While interested in each others’ finds, we didn’t necessarily rush to download each other’s recommendations. Despite being dear friends that could be grouped in the same demographic (age, gender, geographic location), the apps we personally chose to download differed. Anna’s idea of app bliss involved ones that knew her preferences and would save her money. She was willing to travel to save 10 cents per gallon, thus her fascination with Gas Buddy. Me, I bought my gas at the same station 1/8 of a mile from my house 98% of the time and no app was going to change that behavior. I was quite taken with Fooducate at the time as a fun way for my daughter and I to make smart nutritional choices together. And Sarah, the more tactile amongst us, was loving the Fancy app that allowed her to curate and follow design finds on her Android with a Pinterest-like approach.
Together, we spent 12 months studying apps and personally reviewing more than 1,000 of them and even conducting a national study of app preferences and behaviors among smartphone and tablet consumers. Today, we are still talking about and sharing apps, and the majority of the time, still downloading different ones.
It turns out, despite being friends with similar profiles, we are in different “need states." (In this case, a need state is a market research term that describes a state of being underpinned by rational and emotional wants that culminate in a desire for a certain type of app.) That is, we each use apps to answer different needs. Not all app downloads are driven by a desire for productivity; need states also encompass a desire for connectedness, amusement, exploration, education and a variety of other aspirations.
However, as much as we all love the rush of finding new ways to entertain, inform and organize our lives, the reality is that discovering great apps can be cumbersome and few enjoy the hunt. With over one million apps to choose from and more than 15,000 new ones released weekly, consumers are faced with overcrowded app stores, poor search options and the prospect of wading through a sea of uneven and often biased reviews.
Approaching the challenge in a similar way to the discovery of music, books and websites, the vested gatekeepers and a range of startups have jumped in to attempt to solve app discovery. iTunes and Google Play use leaderboards based on the logic that if one million people liked an app, you probably will too. This method uses popularity to surface the best-seller list which in turn makes more people download those apps and all but ensures they remain on the top seller lists. Facebook recently entered the fray with the announcement of its App Center promising to apply social discovery to apps. An “if your friends like this app, there’s a chance you will too” approach. This method has worked well for music and viral videos, but will it work for apps?
While people can coalesce and deem something like Angry Birds a cultural phenomena, these aforementioned discovery methods don’t work as well for predicting all of the apps a person might need, want or benefit from. The tried and true forms of discovery are great for entertainment-driven apps (primarily games), yet these methods are not as successful with the 999,000 apps that don’t hit the leader boards. What makes this even more challenging is that because apps are still so new and cover so many diverse aspects of our lives, consumers often don’t know what they are looking for or want from their apps beyond “something for a long plane ride” or “an app to help my kid learn math facts.”
An effective app discovery method needs to be personalized. It needs to understand what is motivating your downloads, your need states. So far, successful personalized services learn about your preferences and show you items with similar characteristics (like what Pandora does for music) or cross-matches your consumption habits with those of like-minded strangers (Amazon and Netflix have perfected suggesting books or movies you might enjoy based on collaborative filtering). The challenge is these methods still miss helping people discover apps based on their unexpressed need states. Saying, “You liked the Incredible Hulk so you will like the Avengers” just isn’t enough here.
The good news is that consumers are still forgiving because the price of apps is low and they are frequently surprised and delighted by what apps can do. While consumers may have some luck stumbling upon their perfect apps by seeing which apps their friends have, what the experts recommend or which way the cultural winds are blowing, they are likely to be more satisfied with something that understands what they want from their apps and curates an appropriate selection for them. One day, probably in the not too distant future, app discovery will be truly personalized and in the meantime, we will all use a combination of discovery methods including just sitting around a big, buzzing dining room table to sort it all out.
