Disposable Apps – or On-Demand Apps

Lately there has been a lot of news about how people just don’t download apps like they used to – how users just use the same couple of apps for most of their time on their phone. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and WhatApp suck all of the oxygen from the room. Pokémon Go, an absolute breakout success, still had the power of a generation of kids grown up, all wanting to be Pokémon Masters in real life (including one of my own kids who’s now doing it for real). I disagreed with The Business Insider that the app market was in a down slide, and Pokémon Go pretty much is a perfect rebuttal to it. The fastest downloaded app pretty much of all time, and it looks like it’s going to have long legs. But that’s the exception. I want to talk about the disposable apps. Disposable apps are the apps you need once and then delete off your phone. You might need them again, so you just go back to the app store and download it again. You don’t need to keep it on your phone; you only want it when its needed. I have plenty of those. I think we all do. My best example of this is our Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives app . It’s all the locations from the TV show, geo-located around the user and with a handy map of the 25 closest around you. Our core user doesn’t need the app every day. In fact, they don’t even use the app every month. They use it when they travel somewhere new. When we first launched, we used to get email updates from users as they drove from the North East to Florida (actually Orlando, so we knew it was a Disney World road trip). They used the app all the way down and back so they could visit the different locations featured on the show for their meals. We’ve had emails from retirees on RV trips across country doing the same thing. For a fan of the show, you already know all the locations in your home town. It’s when you’re out somewhere new that our app comes in handy. Our challenge is to make sure that when one of our purchasers goes back into the app store to download the app for their current trip, that we still show up and look fresh. Updating our app description to show that we’ve updated the app within the last month lets them know we’re still their go-to app for Di

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