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Comment by ransom1538 | Hacker News Reader

"but the lack of apps ultimately made us move to another ecosystem"

Nuts. People don't even use apps [i]. They may have facebook or netflix installed - but then it gets real thin.

https://www.apptentive.com/blog/2017/06/22/how-many-mobile-a...

Your post and his comment do not contradict one another. Or rather, your interpretation of the data in that post is shaky.

Consistent with the data presented in that post:

-I download lots of one-time-use apps. They're useful, and I won't use a phone without them, and then uninstall them in a week (eg, city specific apps when traveling)

- I download lots of special use apps that contribute few app-hours most of the time, but are super critical when I need them (hiking apps when hiking, service-specific references when I'm working in the relevant department, etc)

-I download games (lots of them), play with them for a while, and then uninstall for a new game. Yeah, most are gone in a week or a month, but the ongoing process is valuable to me.

(Edit addendum:

-I have apps I use quasi-frequently and that contribute very few app-hours of interaction, but are still valuable. Eg, the couple minutes a day I use a task list, the five minutes a week I use FreshDirect, etc.)

And then, yes, there are a handful of core apps that get most of my usage (outlook, kindle, Netflix, messages, safari).

This is entirely consistent with those stats, and still places enormous value on the app ecosystem.

In your comment there are many uses of I. But that isn't how other people generally use their phones - if you can be bothered to look at any data.

The point is that his use is entirely consistent with the data yet you assume it somehow is not

The data you provided does not support your claim that that isn't how other people use their phones.

It seems pretty clear you skimmed my post without reading it (since I bookended it start and finish with the central assertion that the data you presented is consistent with the use case I described.)

If you want to edit your comment to take it in a more fruitful direction, no one will hold it against you. You're not the first person to skim a long post.

In what industry do you work?

Healthcare

> They may have an additional 25 to 30 apps installed, but only five of those are heavily used. The five non-native apps vary from user to user

Doesn't that suggest that while individual users only use a few apps, the union of apps that see significant use is much larger? So you need a wide variety of high quality apps to please a majority of users.

So it's not "none of my apps are available". It's more like "that one app that my gym uses for booking is iOS/Android only" or whatever. Finding a decent WM8 podcast app was virtually impossible back when I had a Lumia, IIRC.

The data you posted do not support the claim “People don't even use apps”, but instead only “most individual users do not regularly use a large number of apps”. But that doesn't mean that either the small number they use frequently or the larger number that they use infrequently are unimportant to the overall utility they derive from their phone, or that there aren't a large number of apps used regularly across any given platform.

Whatsapp? WeChat? Ueber? Ofo? Tinder?

I hardly use my phone for calls. In fact, I prefer Whatsapp or Wechat. And nope, I don't have netflix on my phone.

Yeah, I think that the focus on apps might have actually been part of their problem. How many consumers really saw anything about the platform that made it more appealing than competing platforms? Without a solid killer feature as a differentiator, the apps wouldn't matter.

I'm sure that it made a great measurable and a great excuse for failure, though. I don't doubt that the internal narrative would focus on that.

> Nuts. People don't even use apps [i]. They may have facebook or netflix installed - but then it gets real thin.

Anecdote from a lot of my friends, a lot of use use flashcard type apps to help learn languages and things like memrise etc... Dictionary apps to get word translations and so on.

So I'm going to place that article under: perhaps true in general, but not overly constructive to my group of people.

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