We live in a smartphone world. With iPhones and Android devices ruling the mobile device market, smartphones and smart tablets have taken over the mobile industry. With this in mind, we want to take a few minutes to chat about the importance of mobile apps in terms of compute resources, mobile device development and high-level communications.
The Influence of Smartphones Leading to Mobile Applications
To fully understand the importance of mobile apps, we need to first take a look at the influence of smartphones and connected devices which currently dominate the mobile marketplace. The first major smart device came out of RIM in the form of the original BlackBerry. The BlackBerry effectively took the idea of “always connected” and made it not only mandatory for workers across a broad spectrum of disciplines, it also made “always connected” cool. Smartphones made checking your email on the go and sending SMS data cool to private consumers.
The next major jump in smartphone technologies came in 2008. From 1999 (RIM launches its first major smart email pager device) to early 2008, the jumps in the smartphone market were hardware based. BlackBerry got cool and then become uncool. iPhone got hot then Android devices shot up the charts. But again, the jumps were in compute resources of smartphones and hardware (the look, the feel etc.). It wasn’t until July of 2008 that Apple changed the smartphone “always connected” mobile world with the release of the App Store. Until that point, phone providers manufactured news phones to see who could have the fastest CPU or who could stream video best through high bandwidth capabilities; the Apple App Store changed all that.
With the Apple App Store, and the soon to follow Google Play store, phone providers now had another more important reason to better their hardware, displays and compute resources – mobile applications.
Mobile Apps Change the Mobile Device World
This can’t be said strongly enough – mobile apps wholly changed the mobile device market for the better. With the influx of smartphone apps on the Android market and the App Store, mobile manufactures began to make their devices stronger and easier to use not because the public demanded it but because the smartphone apps the public loved to use demanded it.
Think about this for a moment: Of the top ten most downloaded apps ever on the Android Google Play store, four of the top ten are Social Media free mobile apps. Additionally, two of the top apps are communication applications while one is a very user friendly game.
On the other side of the coin, in the Apple App store, four of the top 15 most downloaded apps are Social Media apps while three more are high-level communication tools and two more are wonderfully fun games.
Note: For those wondering the top downloaded apps are the same in both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. Those apps: Facebook, Twitter, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Skype, WhatsApp Messenger Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja.
But the question is, why does this matter? Why does the mobile app market matter to the production of smartphones and tablets like the iPad, iPad Mini and Google Nexus? The answer is simple: resources and communication.
Mobile Applications Push For Higher Smartphone Capabilities
The most downloaded Social Media app in the world is Facebook. While Facebook isn’t tremendously visually intensive, the mobile application takes a good amount of resources to run smoothly. With a high polished interface, multiple capabilities, video streaming, video chat streaming, photo viewing, in app game playing and a myriad of other in Facebook mobile application capabilities, the Facebook mobile app takes a lot of resources to run. While this might seem like a bad thing for smartphone and tablet performance, it isn’t. The most compute labor resources the Facebook mobile app, the Twitter mobile app, Instagram, Skype and Angry Birds takes to run, the more providers are going to have to put into their phones to make said apps run smoothly. Mobile Apps have changed the phone production market by forcing the hand of manufactures to make more powerful devices suited for mobile application use.
Mobile Applications Force Crystal Clear Communications
In terms of communication services, Skype is one of the most known. For the majority of businesses, Go To Meeting is the choice video conferencing solution however for consumers, Skype is the go to. We mention Skype because much like the Facebook mobile app and the Twitter mobile app has done for smartphone compute capabilities, Skype, KIK, Google Voice, WhatsApp Messenger have done for native phone communications.
With more and more smartphone applications dedicated for communication – for human connection – smartphone and tablet providers are being forced to increase their native communication app capabilities to provide for more powerful SMS/MMS communications, video conferencing abilities and calling performance. While most people think Skype is most known for connecting video conference calls the world over, in reality the Skype mobile app along with a variety of other communication apps, are bettering the smartphone market for all consumers seeking human connections.
So, are mobile apps changing the world? You bet your ass they are. More importantly, mobile applications are changing the world for the better. So go on, send a letter of thanks to the masters over at Rovio.