Dive Brief:

• A recent Gartner study on mobile apps found that app use is down with 33% reporting using six to 10 apps per month down 6.2% year-over-year, per a company press release.
• Going into the results by type of app found that messaging, personal assistant (VPA) and shopping app use was on the rise while social media, video and mapping app usage fell although the latter group remained the most popular overall.
• “Users want rich and engaging app experiences and are increasingly looking for apps that can offer a multitude of services without users having to leave the app itself. This supports the move toward messaging and VPAs, and ultimately the post-app era," said Jessica Ekholm, research director at Gartner, in the press release.

Dive Insight:

For brands and app providers, the results point to the need to start developing engagement strategies for messaging and personal assistant apps. Ekholm suggested enhancing services and introducing new experiences in messaging platforms without making the user download further apps is an area of “critical real estate for innovation.” Chatbots are one way to reach users on messaging apps. While early results for chatbots have been mixed, the interfaces are expected to improve quickly. On personal assistant apps, marketers should be looking at what's required to make their search strategy more friendly to spoken voice queries. 

Gartner’s breakdown of the study results centered on the rise of VPAs and messaging apps, pointing to conversational interfaces and the ability of these apps to let users take multiple actions as reasons why the two categories are beginning to replace other more specialized apps. For example, VPAs were used to check the weather (70%), find places (44%) and catch up on the news (44%), all activities that more specialized apps cover but can be accessed in one place via a simplified voice command interface.

Messenger apps have become what Gartner described as “incredibly sticky,” with 72% of respondents reporting using a messaging app at least once per day. Features like user-generated videos, customer service chats and built-in m-commerce capability makes messaging apps increasingly engaging, per the report.