A new ‘app store’?
The introduction of iPhone and the App Store (and later, Android and the Google Play Store) ushered in an age of incredible innovation, radically transforming what we do with our phones.
By creating a platform and marketplace, Apple and Google inspired millions of independent developers to create countless new capabilities for consumers, generating billions of dollars of revenue for themselves and the platforms. We all now know the result: “There’s an app for that.”
Today, our phones are filled with apps we’ve installed, but according to App Annie (2020), we spend over 50% of our time inside just a few social media and messaging apps.
It doesn’t matter what mobile operating system we’re running, the feature sets we engage with the most are provided by a few major apps: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.
These apps are the new platforms (no matter the device OS), and they might benefit from a new, cross-network marketplace that welcomes independent developers to extend their capabilities.
A new ‘app store’
If we think of social networks as the new platforms for innovation, what kinds of new capabilities could we envision?
Today, each social network provides its own proprietary way to create posts, for example, Facebook provides eight different Post Types.
If we think of each of these post types as “mini apps” that get rendered in the feed, we might envision dramatically more diversity of capabilities. If each mobile app store has over 4 million apps, why are we left with such relatively little capability inside of the social platforms where we spend the majority of our time?
What if the developers who have been creating native apps focused their attention on expanding the capabilities of what you could do inside of existing social apps?
What if there was a marketplace that supported the consumer discovery and monetization of these new types of “Sharable Mini Apps” or “Interactive Posts”?
We are about to find out :)
You might also appreciate this podcast conversation I had with David Pierce
Please leave me a video comment :)
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