Indeed, mobile phone apps are now ubiquitous – it’s hard to buy a mobile phone that isn’t smart enough to run apps, and that means the small pieces of software that offer maps, entertainment and advice are now in millions of pockets around the UK. Nearly 15 billion apps have been downloaded on Google’s operating system, and more than 25 billion on Apple’s iPhone and iPad. The growth rates indicate that those trends are only the start.
More than 115,000 members of the public voted in 12 categories at appys.com. Shortlists were drawn up by a panel of expert judges, including Britain’s first app millionaire, Simon Oliver, representatives from the media, myself included, and from sponsors Carphone Warehouse.
The aims of the Appys are to recognise excellence in the apps that millions use already, to foster innovation and also to promote new apps of which some users may not be aware.
As a judge, it’s tempting to promote the most innovative, niche apps and forget those that are much bigger ‘box office’. Facebook, Google Maps, YouTube and eBay are the apps that millions of people have downloaded.
According to Andrew Harrison, Carphone Warehouse’s chief executive, “It’s estimated that in 2012 alone, mobile users will download nearly 36 billion apps.” Although this year the awards introduced new categories in, for instance, health and wellbeing, the majority of those apps downloaded will be the hugely popular games such as Angry Birds, offers app Groupon or picture editing programme Photoshop Express.
Two key trends, however, emerge: the first is that while radical innovation sometimes does come from small app developers, in fact enormous companies such as Google and Facebook are continuing to drive much innovation in mobile apps.
Facebook claims 400million mobile users and its main Google app has even reviewed by 3 million mobile users. Google’s own Maps app surely won in its category in large part because of its sheer utility, but also because of its regular and relentless updates, with new features added routinely. The introduction, for instance, of full 3D mapping for huge swathes of central London is a result of investment that only major companies can possibly make.
While apps were once built in bedrooms, now those that win awards seldom are. The second conspicuous trend, however, is the speed at which innovation in apps is continuing to race ahead: those that were shortlisted but did not win, such as music service Spotify, sometimes lost solely because they had lower adoption levels than, say, YouTube. New features in apps are offering visions of the future far sooner than we thought we would see them.
So next year, there are very likely to be applications that use augmented reality and which share our locations more creatively than those that were nominated this year. Could it be useful, for instance, that Facebook users should know how close you are to an event you arranged with them on Facebook? That means a whole set of interesting new challenges on privacy and usability – but it also means we are likely features in just a year’s time that we currently struggle to even envisage.
