That apps have ceased to exude their initial charm is a foregone conclusion. A new app hitting the market holds no excitement, unless the developer manages to make some waves by incorporating certain innovation into content or strategy. What the tech world terms as ‘app fatigue’ is simmering. Every user must be struggling to accommodate as many apps as possible on the smart phone home screen. From the developers’ perspective, the trick is to stand out and stay away from redundant ideas and repetitive patterns.
Tech website Techcrunch puts it thus: “From a technology perspective, apps can be painful to build and maintain. You have to deal with the approval overlords who can be as efficient as airport security. Furthermore, bug fixing, new feature rollouts and version control is uncomfortably slow compared with that of traditional server-side development,” it says.
To thrive in a competent scenario with big players like WhatsApp, Facebook and Google is no easy task. The user side is less complicated in such a scenario. They can just purge what appears to be least appealing or useful. There’s the jackpot — redemption from the jampacked home screen and ample free space in phone memory!
To the question of what next, the answer is always chatbots, which is not yet free from the eye of suspicion. Security tops the list of concerns. “With security a big fear amongst users adopting new technology, there is a significant risk of bots being written to phish sensitive user information, with currently few ways to prevent this. As such, until there is a bulletproof way to prevent this, trust from users and adoption in bots will be fairly low with an inevitable ‘shiny new thing’ spike at the beginning,” writes Campaignlive.
This aside, users are not happy with anything that demands too much interaction. Chatbots are said to make more taps than apps to get things done. However, rather than getting caught in the technicalities, certain users find the mobile web better, for it offers a more user friendly screen space.
