Prediction: the google play, apple, and amazon app stores will eventually move to a model similar to how music has played out – you pay to subscribe to a library, and artists are paid by actual play time. Apps are downloaded on demand, as you ask for them, rather than taking up permanent space on your phone. Your phone will smartly cache apps based on usage patterns. It will feel like you have all the apps at your fingertips!
Instant Access
At one point in history, music switched from buying physical albums to buying individual songs digitally, and then eventually to where we are today, subscribing to one of the streaming music services. Today you can pay $15 every month and have access to any song your heart desires, and it’s like they’re all there on your device instantly ready to go. Some day in the near future, I suspect we will do the same with apps.
Why would I say that?
We’re at a similar point of inflection where you can almost download apps on-demand.
Previous to streaming music, we all purchased albums, ripped them to digital versions, and then stored them on our computer’s hard drive, You could either pirate, or purchase a whole library full of songs. You would carry them with you from computer to computer. Losing a library was rare, but it could happen, and it was devastating.
With phone apps, we are still in the point in history where we store them on our physical hard drives. You purchase an app, store it on your drive, and use it as you like. It permanently takes up space, and lives as a first class citizen. If you ever use that app again, it’s likely you won’t go through the trouble of deleting it.
At some point soon, I suspect we will download the app and use it every time you pull it up to use it. What will it take? Fast internet. That’s about it. When it takes less than a second to start an application from a digital stream of the code, we’ll be at the same point where music made a turn – you could stream any song any time because the stream was indistinguishable in speed from it being on your hard drive.
Managing space constraints, and organizing and categorizing never sticks
Any time we can avoid managing things we will. Every technology tends to shed management. For example, we used to have to be very careful about long distance minutes. We used to have to be careful about cell phone data usage. In any system we will always try to eliminate management tasks, because they are never endemic to the problems we’re solving. Ultimately the same will be true about apps. Do you really care if its on your phone or the cloud? Do you really care how much space you have left on your phone? (besides the limitations it imposes…). I’m suggesting hardware limitations are unnatural complexity in a system like this. Organizing and managing apps is not valuable to the end user.
We tend to prefer infinite systems – systems that self manage. Think about how photos are synced to the cloud with an archive strategy. Everything more than a month or two old gets “deleted”, and if you want to access it again, you have to download it. To your usage and experience, space is not a concept. Space constraints are not endemic to the task of taking and finding photos.
Subscriptions for Apps
The same will be true about apps. All we ultimately care about is whether we have access to the app. And you’ve seen in the music industry, they’ve solved that problem with library subscriptions. You have access to every song. Almost.
Apple Arcade is an example of this. You pay a few dollars a month, and get every app they curate. This is how the music world started as well. I’m not sure if Apple pays the game devs by play, or by download, or what, but it’s the right direction.
By eliminating the question, you’ve removed some of the unnatural complexity. What humans are great at doing is finding the best solution they can discover, and building habits around it. Let’s let people do that! Then the fittest apps will rise to the top.
Currently we have price as a barrier to discovery. Better apps tend to cost more. This puts the risk on the customer, rather than the developer. If we flipped that, and paid developers by usage time, in the same way songs are paid by play time, we’d have a naturally selecting system. Crummy apps would die. Great apps would thrive.
Will this happen?
Probably not soon. Right now apps are monetized a few ways:
- Free with Ads (this is the crappiest and most annoying thing about apps right now). This is similar to how music is monetized on the radio.
- Free with In App Purchases. These can be either annoying or really nice. I don’t want to pay for things I’m not using. I’m happy to pay for add-ons when I can see the value. But I also don’t want to get into something, and have someone put up pay walls for continuing on.
- Fee up front. Some apps just cost money to gain access to them.
Moving to a subscription model, like the Apple Arcade would require a shift in these models, and I think it can happen, but it will take time.
It comes down to feel
Ultimately this will work when starting up an app from the cloud feels the same as starting it from your phone storage. When it feels instant, your experience will be that you have all the apps, just like we feel with music in Spotify. We have all the songs!
Leave a Reply