Are you (still) building B2C Mobile apps for your org?

Smartphones & Apps are almost synonymous in technology as well as on end user mind-share. It is the Apps, which had differentiated the user experience between Smartphones and the old Feature phones. But is there a change in the Smartphone-App association now?

As per fairly current estimate, there are (this wiki page has more) approx. 1.3 million apps present on Google Play store. Similarly Apple has around 1.2 million in its App store (more here). But before you read further, please try to recall how many apps you did download in the last month in your Android or Apple smartphone. Once you are done, check the number with your partner also. You may like to extend this quick survey to few more folks, whom you meet during the morning walk or the board meetings. As you get more data, what is the average number coming out to be?

To get the context straight, 65% of US smartphone users downloaded ZERO apps in a month, as per a latest survey (read more about the report). Did that surprise you really? This should not have surprised you, if you had done the survey already.

To understand the WHY part of this trend, we can get into the user psychology and more such complex stuff. The answer may point to an over enthusiasm-about-apps-story and the resultant app-athy users are growing now. But more importantly from Technology Management stand point, one should find out the key takeaways for any CIO from this change in trend, while he gets ready to author/update the Enterprise Mobility Strategy.

Lesson 1. CIO should put most of his focus on Business to Employee apps. This is where the CIO would get the highest ROI, as the employees become more efficient and productive. The app need not compete with the best of the apps on the Play store, but it should serve the business purpose clearly.

Lesson 2. B2C apps are like Facebook pages. It's a sin not to have one, though hardly anyone tracks the adoption rate. A CIO should keep this in mind, and measure his investments accordingly instead of going on an overdrive for building a bevy of B2C apps.

Disclaimer: The App portfolio composition differs quite a lot across industries. It's almost mandatory for some of the industries (like Newspaper, Car rental) to have strong B2C apps these days, while someone selling products in rural India might have this in good-to-have list.

Your industry is unique. In view of that, how does your organization's app portfolio look like?

PS: This post was also published in my Linkedin Author page - here.

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Thank you for checking this article. I contribute regularly on Technology & Management related stuff. Apart from this blog, you can follow me at 
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About me: I have been working in the areas of IT strategy & usage of Digital technology to deliver business growth. My areas of interest include Enterprise Mobility, Cloud Solution Architecture, Enterprise Architecture, Social Media and Big Data. I am an alumni of Indian Statistical Institute (MTech Computer Science) and also attended Harvard Business School Executive Education on Innovation and Driving Growth.