Stand-alone Mobile Apps versus Internet Browser Apps

              When I first came across this question about mobile apps versus internet browser apps, the first thing that popped into my head was mobile apps are far better. Why? In my own opinion because according to emarketer.com there are over 2 billion people who have smartphones in the world. This makes mobile apps more accessible to the world. People are always on their phone, and it is much easier to pull out your phone than it is to carry around a desktop or have access to a desktop. I know many people who don’t have a desktop and rely on their smartphones for everything. The thing in your pocket is much easier and convenient and that’s what people like.

                In the article ‘Apps have overtaken the Web in popularity’ it shows a graph from June 2010 to December 2011 and how the trend of minutes spent a day on web browsing compared to mobile apps. In June 2010 web browsing had about 20 minutes longer each day. In December 2010 they were about equal with web browsing being a little bit more each day. In June 2011 that is when mobile apps took the lead, and by December of 2011 we used mobile apps 22 minutes longer than web browsing. Today there is most likely a much bigger gap. I hardly ever see people web browsing on a desktop.  This just includes browsing the internet, it doesn’t include time spent gaming or other things you can do on the internet.

                Growing up kids were always on the desktop at home playing some type of computer game. Now we just had children an iPad and let them do whatever they want on it. Mostly play games or watch their favorite kid shows on Netflix. I hardly ever see kids outside playing like I used to when I was a kid. It is a lot more convenient to give a kid an iPad than it would to give them a computer. This just proves that we spend much more time on mobile apps than on web browser apps. They have an app for pretty much everything, and many of the browsing is done within the apps.

                It’s crazy to think how quickly people went from browsing on internet apps to browsing via mobile apps. In the article I mentioned earlier it only took about one year for the mobile apps to take control of how people spend their time browsing. In the articles I read they all mention that mobile apps will keep getting more dominant until the year 2020. That’s as far as they have predicted so far, and who knows what’s after that!

Let me know what you think, or what your opinion is on web apps and mobile apps!