As per Altman Vilandrie and Company's research, two-thirds of U.S. Residents will carry a smartphone in next five years, and Gartner predicts Smartphones shipment would exceed the normal phone shipment by 2013 worldwide. Add in the effect of 3G penetration which has reached its inflection point as per latest Morgan-Stanley research, and you are looking at domination of mobile smartphones over the PCs and Laptops in near term. This translates to a need for having smartphone application development strategy for your business.
Often, the first question which gets asked is What can a smartphone app help me achieve?
There is no Simple Answer to this. At a higher level, Benefits which you can expect from investing in smartphone apps can be following:
Let's take some examples from real life. eBay is targeting $1.5 billion in sales through mobile this year and Pandora.com saw its visitors jump by 200% after launching mobile apps.
Industry | Smartphone Apps |
Retail, e-Commerce | e-retailers like Amazon are supplementing their online efforts with smartphone apps ( mobile sales target of $1 Billion), and Brick and Mortar retailers like Macy's and Best Buy are making their offline stores more interactive using Smartphone apps. |
Automotive | BMW has an iphone app and android app for roadside assistance, and Ford is making smartphone apps part of car controls. |
Education | Universities, and schools like Case Western University, Stanford are engaging students and parents with access to intranet, grades, classes schedule and and more on their smartphones. |
Social Networks | Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn have seen a huge jump of their traffic coming in from mobile apps in the last two years. |
Publishers | Newspapers, Magazines and Blog owners like New York Times, Wired, Gigaom are increasingly monetizing their content on mobile devices by creating dedicated smartphone apps for each platform. |
Brands | Coke, Kraft Foods, Pepsi are mixing useful information which their customers like, along with their brand message to create immersible mobile branding which is non-obtrusive. |
Entertainment | Entertainment companies like Youtube, Hulu, NBC are increasingly monetizing their content with smartphone apps. |
Game Changers | Bump, Location based apps like Foursquare, Gowalla, Weather and Map applications have changed the way we use smartphones by their apps. |
Communications | Skype and other VOIP providers are providing low cost international and local dialing over 3G and WiFi networks using their apps. |
Enterprises | With smartphones adoption on the rise CIOs are helping executives by proving metrics, dashboards, sales and support data, intranet and more on their smartphone devices using apps. |
Music | Pandora.com saw its registered users jump 200% after launching iphone, Blackberry Android App. |
Utility | Swype is changing the way we type on Android, and Construction Master Pro is one of the highly successful paid apps being sold at $19.99 |
Banks | Chase Bank offers an iPhone app with which you can take a picture of your cheque and deposit it in the app itself, saving the trip to bank. |
Government | San Francisco city's ecofinder app helps in increasing the recycling and UK Government is spending thousands o pounds on building smartphone apps. |