The Next Great Platform is the One That We Already Have
You hear it all the time: Mobile is over. The app boom is finished. The average American downloads zero apps per month (okay, maybe 1.5 apps per month) — so it’s time to start thinking about the “next big thing.”
Of course, nobody really means that mobile is “over,” just that all the big opportunities have already been grabbed. The thinking is that, with Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp, WeChat, and Twitter out there, and no one downloading many apps any more, there’s just no room for something new. It’s too late. Don’t bother trying to do something great in mobile — instead, figure out what the next big thing is and get on that.
So everybody is sitting around talking about what the next great platform might be. Is it augmented reality? Virtual reality? Drones? Robots? Artificial intelligence?
Here’s my take: All of this “it’s over” talk has happened before, and all this will happen again. Looking back to 2002–2004, we all felt that the consumer Internet was played out. Nobody was starting consumer companies. Yahoo! and AOL were the dominant portals, Amazon had staked its claim on the e-commerce world, Google was well on its way to search engine dominance, a bunch of ridiculous dot-coms had met their deserving fates, and there didn’t seem to be much room for anything else. We were waiting for the next big thing after the Web.
And yet that’s exactly when Web 2.0 started happening. In the space of a few years, all of the giants of today’s social world got their start. They didn’t depend on any major new technology breakthroughs to become successful. Friendster, then LinkedIn, MySpace, and YouTube, then Facebook — they all came out of basically the same platform as the companies in the dot-com boom.
It was all user-generated content. There was no massive wave of platform change, except to the extent that there were more people getting online. There was a demographic shift (more people) followed by a social shift and a psychological shift. Sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, and Friendster took off because they met these new, fundamental needs in a way that no sites had done before.
Sure, there was some new technology in the early 2000s. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) made a much more interactive, responsive user experience possible, and many startups took advantage of this to improve their UX and differentiate themselves from older sites. The LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) dramatically reduced the costs of building a scalable website, compared to the expensive HP servers and Oracle databases that went before. But it’s worth noting that both AJAX and LAMP were essentially refinements and additions to existing Web technologies. They weren’t totally new platforms — they were improvements.
So when I look at today’s consumer mobile landscape, I see things like Pokémon Go becoming a fast phenomenon, and it’s clear that it’s not succeeding thanks to some radical new technology or new platform. People call Pokémon Go “augmented reality” but it’s really just a fairly simple superimposition of images on top of the camera display. In early versions of iOS apps couldn’t draw graphics directly on top of a live camera image, but Apple removed that restriction, and now Pokémon Go is possible. But that’s a technology tweak, an incremental improvement, not a great leap forward. It’s a team that has been working on similar problems like this for a long time and having it all come together. Sure, they were able to take advantage of a beloved brand which helped them get a big launch. But it has worked well beyond just the strength of the Pokemon brand because they built something unique, different, and fun. I’ve never seen so many people wandering around together with their phones out and talking to each other.
What happened in the Web 2.0 era was that some companies succeeded in creating totally new experiences, engaging consumers, and enabling them to connect with other people in a way that had never happened before online.
Now that we’re in a fully mobile world, I think there is a lot of room to create new experiences and connect people. What are the kinds of experiences that aren’t happening yet in mobile? What core needs do people have now that aren’t being met by our current crop of mobile and social apps?
It’s worth remembering that the global app market could be generating $100 billion in revenue by 2020, according to App Annie, with continued growth across the board, even in mature markets. So mobile is far from dead.
If you look at the apps that break out and rise to the top of the app store rankings (apart from games), they tend to offer something compelling to consumers. There have been a number of new apps that have broken out to the top 5 of the App Store for iPhone for at least a week this year. Generally, getting to that level means you receive over a million downloads in that period if not several millions.
These all have let people do something new with their phones. They all spread virally and grew rapidly. Whether or not these grow to become platforms of the future is still a question, but that doesn’t deny the proof that people are interested in downloading apps and trying them. Getting apps to stick is another issue — but getting people to try it is a necessary first step. Here are just a few examples of these “quick hit” apps that peaked in some week in 2016:
- MSQRD: app to create fun images via new “lenses” (grew very rapidly as a better version of Snapchat’s lenses before Facebook purchased it earlier in the year)
- Miitomo: people create avatars and can then interact with each other (grew after promotion from Nintendo)
- HouseParty: app that allows groups of up to 6 to video chat with each other (grew rapidly through word of mouth before some scaling issues set in)
- Kiwi: app to ask and answer questions anonymously (spread rapidly among teens via viral invitations and influencer promotions)
- Prisma: lets people make beautiful, stained-glass style art from their photos. (growing as people discover the app through Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter)
- Bitmoji: gives people a way to create their own expressive sticker emoji (grew for many years, acquired and integrated by Snapchat)
In general, these apps all do one of two things — (1) give people a way to express themselves visually, by creating art, stickers, or even avatars that make interacting with their friends more fun and expressive. (2) connect and communicate in new ways. These both have pretty universal demand — and the interest in even downloading and exploring them shows there are many opportunities not solved by the biggest companies. That said, it takes a lot of work to make something sticky and long term — one can still question whether that’s possible in this era of large companies and networks.
As I wrote earlier this year, there are a few other areas where current offerings aren’t meeting people’s needs well enough yet. There’s no good solution for live conversation, particularly with groups of people. There needs to be something with the simplicity and fun of Slack, but for groups of people outside work. I miss the old AOL’s ease of finding interest groups, collections of like-minded people to hang out with. And I wish there were better tools for managing and preserving the zillions of photos we are all creating and uploading.
But these ideas are just a start. In reality, there are probably hundreds of core needs that aren’t being met by mobile today, but which could be.
I don’t think we need to wait for a new platform to make these kinds of magical new experiences happen. We don’t just need VR/AR/etc to take off. I think it can happen and will happen on mobile. I think Pokemon Go is a beacon for how different, new, and fun new experiences can still be on mobile. And I think some inventions in the next couple of years on our existing platforms are going to be revolutionary. If you are building something like this, let me know!
