The time that people spend consuming digital media has been skyrocketing, and that's largely due to mobile applications. So concludes Comscore's The 2015 U.S. Mobile App Report. And app use growth isn't just on a single platform --- all platforms continue to grow, as does use of the mobile Web. This has big implications for how application developers should spend their time. Creating mobile business apps may be required to reach your customers.
The report says that over the last two years, digital media use in the U.S. has grown 49%. The primary reason: Mobile apps, whose digital media use has grown 90% during that time. It contributes to 77% of the total increase. Mobile browsers contribute to it as well: The time spent consuming media in mobile browsers is up 53% in the last two years.
Mobile rules them all
By the middle of this year, the report says, mobile accounted for almost two out of three digital media minutes -- 62%. However, that's not the entire story. The mobile Web has been growing as well. And comparing the top 1,000 mobile apps versus the top 1,000 mobile Web properties yields an interesting result. Mobile Web properties have audiences that are 1.5 times larger than mobile apps. And their audiences are growing twice as fast.
The report also found that it's easier to build a large audience on the mobile Web than for mobile apps because of how easily and fluidly content can be linked on the Web compared to an app.
There's also a big takeaway for developers: multi-platform digital audiences are growing - largely because of mobile media. You can't reach them just one way, via an app or the Web. You'll need to reach them everywhere. That clearly presents a problem for developers, who may not have the skills to develop for all platforms, and almost certainly don't have the time. Creating custom mobile apps for every platform can require a significant amount of resources - especially if you want to deploy native smartphone apps for each platform.
Alpha Anywhere can be the ideal solution for reaching multi-platform audiences, because it lets you build an app once and deploy it to the Web, mobile Web, and all the mobile app platforms.
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