Last night, an advertisement caught my eye as I was going through the Instagram feed as my nighttime routine. The 10-second video advertised an alarm app that requires you to solve mathematical problems to wake you up from your beauty sleep. The message delivered through the snippet was quite clear, but the necessity was questionable. Numerous application software pools through the Play Store every day, and just with a click, we download them. While some purposes of such downloads lead to productivity or out of absolute necessity, others remain only as a convenience. But knowingly or unknowingly, as we use those apps, we forget to ask ourselves, did we need an app for this purpose?
In this digital world, the definition of necessity is a lot more digitally indispensable than ever. A smartphone that seemed a luxury twenty years back translates to a necessity in the current situation. Necessities like waiting in long queues to deposit money or buying piles of books for coursework are now replaced with banking apps or Google Classroom on our phones. From schoolgoers to retirees, necessity has changed its definition in technology’s course of change.
Our approach to convenience has taken a notch as well. Contrary to the conventional cab or restaurant reservation services, we now have Uber and FoodPanda, catering to our comfort or sometimes even necessity. But the convenience and necessity all have a catch. They all are digital services we access through mobile applications, more precisely, third-party apps that we download through Android Play Store or iOS App Store. And they all require our personal data to offer us the personalization we seek. And that promise of extra comfort comes as a sign of concern.
The abundance of apps on our mobiles is a fairly new conversation. But the digital policies and marketing trends that caused such conversation surely aren’t. The frenzy of companies around ‘an app makes everything better’ is nothing new in the digital transformation scenario. Companies promote apps as a step ahead in convenient experiences for the customers where consumers find it easier to handle the apps than to take service from designated websites. Outside of China, Apple and Google hold over 95 percent of the app store market share through iOS and Android. Although both companies offered pre-installed apps, they quickly introduced their app stores, leading to tens of thousands of developers building apps and games for the platforms just within a year. In less than five years, Apple and Google had over one million apps and games available, generating millions in app revenue for both companies. And the revenue is another indicator of their large user bases.
From both a company perspective and a consumer perspective, apps should be a method of communication, leading to successful customer relationships. But a deeper dig down the system really shows how much consumers lose in this deal, and companies win the total bet. Companies gain consumers and attract them into the companies’ complete ecosystem with attractive deals in the process. The attractive deals companies offer exclusive to apps shift website-using customers to app users, even for a single purchase. Other than the ones we frequently use, the apps that sit idle on our phones month after month can lead to major privacy breaches without our knowledge. One recent study showed that more than 60% asked for “dangerous” permissions that weren’t functionally necessary. We can still make excuses to trade off our data for essential apps, but sharing such important data for one purchase or mere convenience can be bothersome for many. One such example of data breaching convenience feature is McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A’s proposed tracking features for customers’ mobile app orders so that customers get their food fresh upon arrival at the storefront. Two-thirds of global consumers feel that tech companies have too much control over their data, and the statistics show that 72.6% of iOS apps track private user data.
Set aside the consumer perspective, even from a business perspective; apps are not really important for every business. Only businesses with high distribution and large customer bases can win the game. Moreover, many companies even fail to maintain the security and handling of apps, leading to increased data breaches of managerial and consumer data.
And as experts claim that the app market skyrocketing is nothing other than a Bandwagon effect for business owners and marketers. While data is important for businesses and can change the game if used correctly, marketers can get as much data from website users as possible. So the abundance of mobile applications sometimes is a stretch for a business, their operating costs, and manpower.
But even after all, the conversation does not end in a conclusion. The fear of missing out over not having an app comes from both sides- while consumers fear not getting the best deals, businesses fear not getting the most of consumer data. But at the same time, both parties agree that the trade-offs are sometimes too risky for convenience. Sometimes the risk comes through privacy violations and other times through costly compensations. And the way out can only be through more clarification of privacy policies and their implementation. But to reach the point of cure, we must acknowledge the problem. We must ask ourselves, are the apps on our home screen worth the trade-off?
Author– Subeh Tarek
