Are We Suffering From Mobile App Burnout? | Hacker News Reader

Are We Suffering From Mobile App Burnout?

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

30 pointsrobg40 comments

As someone who builds an app with slightly less than 60K users, I'd say this is quite telling of the app industry. A lot of people just dump gas on the distribution flame without any sense of retention. They blow up kind of quickly, but then completely burn out. A lot of investors poured money in to mobile startups over the past 2 years, without product or traction and people are starting to panic. They are pivoting and cloning apps in a last ditch effort to get bridge financing.

Perhaps I'm biased, but I think people are going to start rejecting the notion that real time social networks are the end all and be all of consumption and creation on the mobile phone. Users are getting tired of it, and they are giving us that feedback like crazy.

I've heard YC folks always talk about making something 100 people really love before trying to make something 10^n (n > 6) people will really love. I think it's a good approach because it's hard to know whether you're on to something unless you can measure how many new users each user brings in.

When only 1K apps have more than 50K users, it makes one wonder how many app-only startups will survive in the long run. Unless it's for business it seems that even 50K users on all three major platforms wouldn't support even one employee.

As a co-founder of a startup with much more than 50k users, this 1k app metric shocks me. Does anyone know how Onavo come up with that metric? I've installed their app once, but removed it fairly soon after (so they probably only have a small sample of what I actually use) and i don't see any way for us as a company to integrate.

Edit: Cleaned up my question.

Besides, there's the bias of Onavo's users. Given their product, they tend to be more tech savvy, frequent travelers, users of (limited) intl data plans.

I'm skeptical their sample would be a good representation of the mainstream app audience.

I am wondering how websites compare to apps in the usage pattern? and what type of user (web user or app user) is more valuable?

Unrelated to story content, but relevant to the linked site:

It looks like the NYTimes paywall has become more sophisticated. Simply clearing cookies and localStorage wasn't enough to open it up. I had to open the link in an incognito window before it would let me read it.

Yes, they patched this loophole a few days ago! And the url-bar trick doesn't work anymore!

I suspect they are re-setting cookies and localStorage onunload, but I haven't dug into it more. Tempting to write a chrome extension to open these pages in incognito mode automatically.

Even in incognito mode, you get blocked after 10 articles. You have to close/reopen to reset it, I believe.

Easily fixed though, just disable javascript for nytimes.com.

Kills me that otherwise intelligent consumers are unwilling to pay for something as expensive to create and as high quality as the new york times. Makes me want to give up on product development altogether. Seriously -- if that's not good enough, what will be?

There's a really pernicious attitude of permissiveness, even encouragement, towards theft and evasion of payment for digital goods in many of pockets of online culture. It is disheartening.

The idea of theft of 'digital goods' is absurd.

Goods are defined as "commodities that are tangible, usually movable, and generally not consumed at the same time as they are produced".

Theft is defined as "the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it"

Access to New York Times articles is not a tangible commodity, and bypassing the paywall in no way deprives the New York Times company of access or of a unit of access to the article.

What's being stolen here is revenue. i.e. money.

Money is "tangible, usually movable, and generally not consumed at the same time as it is produced."

Even if by your definition this isn't stealing, you have to admit that you are in fact circumventing the way NYT is attempting to make money for their hard work. The fact is you are stealing from the people who create the content, those maintain it online, etc. Do you intend to deprive the rightful owner of this money? Probably not, but you are still doing it even if that's not your intention.

btw, not trying to single you out, specifically. It's more of a figurative "you"

I'd have no problem paying for it if it was a significant part of my life. I generally just skim the majority of the non-technical articles on HN, not paying attention to who the provider is. Apparently I've clicked and skimmed ten of these NYTimes articles in the last 17 days, which doesn't seem too unlikely given that they show up on HN fairly often.

If you're going to go all high-and-mighty about this, maybe we should be putting a [paywall] link on the HN frontpage so I can avoid clicking these articles altogether.

This would be ideal. I hate running into pay walls as well.

The NYT paywall actually excludes traffic coming from social sources like Facebook and Twitter. They don't do so for Hacker News, though (and I'm not sure about Reddit). So the general principle supports your use-case, it just isn't fine-tuned for the specific sites you use.

I think it could work but you need 2 things: niche content and an audience adding value. I'm not interested in what the NY Times has to say about sports so why would I pay for it, I'm not even remotely interested in 99 % of all of their content.

I can't tell you how many times I don't even bother reading articles. All I read is the comments on Hacker News. Not reading the articles saves me time. Reading the comments doesn't save me time but at least I'm getting a lot of value out of it.

I looked at GigaOm Pro the other day. Some of the content looks interesting and might be worth paying for. Not all of it, but even so, none of those research reports have responses / comments. The audience isn't adding value. Maybe all the value is in the research reports but I just find that hard to believe.

Disabling javascript will let you avoid the paywall. Disable JS, refresh page, re-enable JS works if you can't disable JS on a per-site basis.

Yup, the paywall has gotten stronger and will probably be getting even more upgrades. And they know all the tricks.

Once you start paying, you realize how much great content is on there. Well worth it.

I'm from Europe. I'm not sure what's behind the paywall because I think I see all the content. I never seem to go back to the site. What makes it great content to you ?

It still is somehow based on cookies and/or other client side data (rather than, e.g. looking at your IP address and timestamps as a heuristic).

When I hit the paywall in Chrome, I switched to Safari (which I rarely use, so no NYT cookies or local data there in the cache) from the same machine, and it worke OK.

I think this is just a market correction. There are a lot of things that are "apps" that don't really need to be apps. (Almost any "reader" for a website, for example). Now that an app isn't a novelty, there's going to be a natural backlash to things that we don't really need.

I think you're right. A lot of companies are making an app to show the contents of their website. That just doesn't make sense. The app I use for that is the browser.

I think this entire premise is silly.... most apps and to a much bigger extent websites, social games, steam etc, solve temporary needs.

The odds of anything being integrated into my day to day life are virtually non-existant.

It's much more likely something will please or amuse or occupy me briefly (if at all).

This whole app fatigue concept is such nonsense. What percentage of websites have 50k active users? Do we have website fatigue?

Good apps will rise to the top. That is what they call a market.

Not necessarily the case. It depends what your market is. The early adopter App Store audience is quite diverse, and not at all like the tech early adopter crowd.

In terms of growth, being on the US front page is absolutely huge, so there's lots of politics about getting on there. If you have connections, it's a lot easier to get up there.

Couldn't the same be said about any business? Getting your website covered by TechCrunch would also be easier with connections.

I think he means to extinguish the notion that placement could be based on any kind of merit.

Getting your website covered by TechCrunch will bring in a few hundred, maybe thousand, "one time" users. Front page of the App Store can be 50K over a week.

That doesn't sound fair. But it doesn't surprise me. Most of it is a waste of my time. I find my apps in the browser from people or companies talking about them. Then I go to the app store and do a search for it.

That's how a lot of it works.

You'd be surprised at high the conversion rate is from google -> your download page -> app download

Getting a lot of people to do that is a lot harder than just being front paged though.

Why should mobile apps be any different from any other kind of software? A few popular apps tend to dominate the market and the rest just fill niches.

I highly doubt the 1k/50k stat - I have personally written 6 apps with more than that - so i've written slightly more than 1/2 of 1% of all apps in the app store with more than 50k users? unlikely...

How long ago did you upload them? With burnout presumably people are trying less apps.

They seem to be talking about active users, that use the app regularly while you seem to be talking about downloads.

Note in particular the quote just following the paragraph you are referring to: "For the typical app, less than half the people who download it use it more than once, said Guy Rosen, the chief executive of Onavo."

interesting. that would reduce it to probably 3 though... still a shocking stat but more likely.

I used to work at a mobile app company that made iOS and Android apps. I generally agree. Folks are taking gambles on apps that they really shouldn't.

Lots and lots of apps are far better off as mobile web, especially given all the maintenance/update headaches (app store submissions are still painful and not automated).

There's still a nice monitization story if you're willing to give away 20-30%, but I think the long run equilibrium are fewer apps (not zero, but fewer). They do definitely have value but right now they're overhyped.

This poor author. I think the NYT is putting too much pressure on him to churn out these tech fluff stories and there's not enough material out there. Sorry!

Just in context of the subject, I bet there is an app to measure how burned out you are on apps.

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