Mobile Appsplosion - A worry for apps’ users!

Yes, we agree we are a high-tech generation! We agree we want the best technology that can fetch us all that we desire at ease in just one go. We love to connect with everyone at one time but should that lead to the complexity in our lives? The app glut in our smartphones and tablet apps are becoming so hyped that it gets difficult to manage.

The number of apps is exploding, driven by a huge uptick in the number of mobile devices — and people are using those apps all day long. App usage is driven by all kinds of apps across the board: productivity apps, games, lifestyle apps, social networking, and more.

Those ubiquitous pop-ups and advertisements on our smartphones have pushed users to accessing too many apps. The industry has gone overboard in trying to shift user behavior.

As an example Computer World picked Facebook:

Remember when Facebook had an app? You could post messages, upload and share pictures, message people, read stuff and poke your friends. Now Facebook has many apps for doing similar things. In addition to the main Facebook app, Facebook offers Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, Paper, Camera and others.

None of these are necessary. All those features could be easily accommodated in the main Facebook app. But Facebook is embarking on a strategy of creating a maximum number of mobile apps to take up more space on a smartphone screen and, presumably, capture more user mind share.

In what’s proving to be an unpopular move, Facebook is removing the chat feature from the main Facebook iOS and Android apps to force people to install a second app called Messenger. (The rollout of this policy across the globe will be gradual and take weeks.) It is expected to have more forced adoption of apps that contain what used to be features inside the Facebook app.

There are over a billion smartphones being used around the world today, but most apps running on them are still quite dumb, in that they throw away a lot of valuable information that could be harnessed to serve users better and to provide a better overall experience.

Google Now has its own limitations, especially the lack of integration with other key services like Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft Exchange or other email providers. Entrepreneurs are hoping to exploit these limitations: witness the recent debuts of apps like Mailbox, Tempo, Cue, Grokr and EasilyDo. These apps use intelligence to organize inboxes with a simple swipe, show you useful details for calendar events, provide routes that avoid traffic, dial into conference calls and suggest friends who need to be congratulated or consoled.

 The application landscape has changed forever. Smart apps don’t all have to be virtual assistants or personal productivity apps. Today, when you ask people what really matters to them, they talk about the applications they rely on to get their work done. Inside and outside the enterprise, those apps are diversifying rapidly.

This has become a trend where companies engage in a kind of arms race with competitors to see how many apps they can get everyone to use. Apps that automatically bring forward other apps are nice. But ultimately they’re not a solution to the coming app overload problem. Call it the mobile appsplosion. It’s coming. And it’s not going to be pretty. Imagine a world ruled by Google and Facebook..The users seek refuge!

To get rid of this appsplosion, major companies are buying Android apps that help you deal with app overload. For example, Yahoo bought Aviate. More recently, Twitter bought Cover. Both these apps automatically find a user’s most frequently accessed apps and make them readily available on the home screen so they’re not lost in the haystack of apps on the phone.