Hey Chicken Little, the app dev sky isn’t falling!

Shortly after Business Insider released this teaser to their new report, “The mobile app boom has ended,” — Read it HERE — suddenly every tech blog was running the same headline and their own analysis of the just how screwed the indy developers were now. Searching “The mobile app boom has ended” returns 670,000 results in less than 4 days. That’s pretty click-baitly, and everyone hopped on that bandwagon. The average smart phone user, on average, downloads zero apps per month. The top 15 app publishers’ downloads fell 20% over last year. Only Uber and Snapchat show 100% growth over last year (of the top 15 apps) Ninety percent of all app store revenue goes to the top 1% of all app developers. There are a couple of true factors here, but everyone is overlooking several additional factors in the race to declare the bubble bursting. Smartphone penetration is still going on. Next year, its estimated that 34% of the world’s population will have a cell phone. While many of those people probably won’t be playing Angry Birds, they will continue to use local social media tools, messaging platforms, and an unknown number of local apps to solve problems that we in the first world don’t even know exist. QZ has a good summary of a new report from comScore that shows that 65% of US smartphone users download zero apps per month. But that’s still not bad news. Thirty-five percent download one or more apps every month. This is like saying that 65% of web users don’t visit a new web page on a monthly basis. I can see that. Plenty of people have their routine. They visit Facebook, Yahoo News, and six other sites…and that’s it. If they visit something new, its because they got a link from a friend in their Facebook feed. But I don’t imagine people will stop making new websites just because PC sales are flat or down and the average PC user only visits the same 10 sites every month. Why would apps be different? There are some valid points within this, but they aren’t “the app sky is falling.” The right product will find a place, even with broken app store search (that probably won’t be fixed by Apple running ads in the search results). But there are plenty of niche places indy develo

Back to blog