When the feature phones dominated the mobile phone
market, people needed just enough memory space to store their contacts, a few
pictures, and maybe some audio files. But the smart phones changed the whole
landscape. It was a change whose enormity is yet to sink in completely in the
market and the market is yet to achieve the point of saturation to reach the
potential capabilities of the phone.
With smart phones overtaking the market, there is no
end to what people want to do with the small device that fits in their palm.
They want to have lots and lots of pictures, audio & video files, even full
length movies, and most of all, lots of apps.
Talking of the apps, there is simply no end to the
list of useful apps. There are apps for entertainment, gaming, shopping,
reading, learning, information, and for every category of use that one can
think of. Any age-group, any socio-cultural profile, geographic region,
linguistic background, literacy level, nature of profession one can think off –
there are not one or two but hundreds, if not more apps just appropriate for
the user.
The market for apps user is huge. There has been a
drastic increase in smart phone users in India in the last few years. As per a
latest statistics, the number of smart phone users by the end of the year 2016
is estimated to reach around 204.1 million, with the worldwide
number likely to exceed 2 billion users by that time. It’s a readymade market
for the app developing companies, which have dotted the market space everywhere
across the globe.
Yet the biggest bottleneck to downloading and
keeping all the useful apps is the insufficient memory space of the phones, and
it’s a real problem that not many app developing companies seem to be genuinely
concerned about looking at the huge MB size of some of the apps hitting the
market. They don’t realize that the moment you cross a threshold size barrier,
which could be as low as even 30 to 40 MB, you are losing out on a big chunk of
customers.
While it’s true that people are spending a lot of
money on buying expensive smart phones these days, yet every user doesn’t have
a high end device. In a country like India, where a majority of smart phone
users come from the low income level because of high concentration of
population in rural areas, the market is flooded with inexpensive smart phones
and one can get various cheap buying options under Rs 5000 to 6000 bracket.
Now these low cost smart phones have their own
challenges and create various problems for app marketers. Some mobiles run on
older Android versions, while others just don’t have sufficient memory space, which
means that consumers very quickly reach a point when they need to begin uninstalling
an app so as to make space for a new one. Naturally, choosing the right apps to
keep in one’s phone is a difficult choice and a user has to be constantly
struggling with this issue as more and more apps keep flooding the market.
Companies are coming up with large apps making them
suitable for high end devices. They are adding more and more features and
flashy interactions to attract those users and in the process are losing out on
the low-end smart phone users. But, just because your phone does not have enough
free space does not imply that you cannot have good apps in your phone.
App developers need to target the low end smart
phone user by developing good apps that occupy less space in the phone. If they
do not focus on making light apps there are high chances that their apps may
get deleted immediately after downloading due to space constrain.
Making light apps may be often a trade-off between
memory space and the app features. But there are companies that are addressing
this issue and trying to figure out how to have the best of both. Anant Computing
Platform is actively marketing itself claiming to help businesses develop light
apps without compromising on features and quality. It claims reducing the size of
a rich and heavy app to as much as 1/10th of a usual mobile application. You
can have apps that can rest in your phone without taking much space but have
all the functionalities of a rich and heavy app.
