As the first decade of mobile smartphones ends, the future ahead is “going to look a little weird,” Michael Trapani, product marketing leader for IBM’s Watson Marketing, warned at the Internet Summit on Thursday.
Before talking about “The strange future of mobile and how to prepare for it” at his Internet Summit session, Trapani took a look at “how we got here.”
He showed a slide of the Nokia 1100, launched in 2003, which had a one-inch LCD display and could store a whopping 50 contacts. It was the most popular cell phone in its time. Then, in 2007, Apple launched the first iPhone, and today, “An entire industry has been built around the mobile experience since,” Trapani said.
The other two key events were the launch of the Apple App store and the Google Android operating system in 2008. But “we were all wrong about mobile for years,” he said.
Initially, people using mobile “was something you did when you were out and about, at a game, and event, the airport and we built use cases on that assumption. But now, we’ve reached the stage where “mobile is no longer mobile,” he said.
Apps escape their icons
Today mobile users are as likely to be using their phone “while sitting on the couch at home watching “Stranger Things. You interact more with mobile devices at home than you do at Starbucks.”
In today’s world, “Apps have escaped their icons,” said Trapani. By volume alone, apps are doing better than ever with continued explosive growth. There are more than 2.5 billion apps in the Apple store alone. But app downloads have plummeted from ten a month in 2008 to about one and a half a month now.
“Mobile users spend about 90 percent of their time on core apps, messaging, a browser, and social apps. In the past, if you wanted to use an app, you tapped an icon. Now operating systems have evolved to allow function in other apps, such as a payment system built into messaging or Uber paired with a voice personal assistant.”
What’s coming down the mobile pike?
“The future of publishing is mobile,” Trapani said. A study of use trends at the Verge tech news web site shows that from 2015 to 2016, web site article page traffic shrank as video, primarily on Facebook, grew significantly.
So, Trapani said, one way to prepare for the future is “to build your system for flexibility. There will always be new advertising and content formats.”
The major change coming, he said, is artificial intelligence.
