How will you benefit from building a mobile application?

The use of mobile applications has significantly increased over the past 5 years and continues to grow. In 2019, the number of their installs reached 204 billion worldwide rising from 140.7 billion in 2016, according to Statista. In 2019, the revenue generated from smartphone apps amounted to $462 billion.

However, what will be 2020 for them, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic? How can you take advantage of building a mobile product? Find out in the article!

How the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the mobile app industry?

In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, billions of people stay at home using mobile devices to communicate, order food, purchase goods, exercise, study, and entertain. Businesses are moving online to continue earning profit.

They are also organizing remote work to maintain internal operations. Although many sectors are suffering an economic crisis, some companies can seize the opportunity and earn an income by creating a mobile app. Take a look at how the number of hours spent on Android smartphones has increased because of the COVID-19:

Source: App Annie “Weekly Time Spent in Apps Grows 20% Year Over Year as People Hunker Down at Home” by Adithya Venkatraman

While hotels, restaurants, travel agencies, and others are losing money and even going bankrupt, some are generating revenues. Business apps, e-learning solutions, video streaming services, audio and video communication tools, health and fitness products, food delivery platforms, gaming applications are examples of verticals where you can succeed.

The use of mobile apps during the COVID-19, in accordance with AppsFlyer:

• As of May 7, in-app purchases continue to grow, bringing income to their product owners. User spending in mobile applications increased a further 8% at the beginning of May 2020.
• The revenue generated by streaming platforms doubled since the end of February 2020. Because of partial or complete lockdowns, video entertainment services saw a 6x increase during March 2020. Since February 25, users have been actively using video streaming applications (+125%). As of May 7, this trend continues to prevail.
• Online delivery services are seeing significant growth: since people have to stay at home, the revenue increased 11% during the first week of May. The global food delivery is on the highest demand now: since March 17, the revenue jumped 25%.
• Mobile applications that refer to verticals such as lifestyle, fitness, education, and music are also witnessing significant profit growth. For instance, the revenue earned by health and fitness apps increased by 35% since March 17.
• After a gradual slump, downloads of finance mobile applications grew by 18%.
• The income produced by shopping solutions increased by 15% since March 17.
• The time spent on all gaming categories has significantly risen since the beginning of March. For instance, at the beginning of April, people in the USA played mid-core games +22% more time, casual games +13%, social casino +12%, and hardcore games +9%.

The use of mobile applications during the pandemic, in accordance with App Annie:

• Since today people across the globe are strongly relying on mobile devices in remote collaboration, the use of smartphone solutions for this purpose is extremely increasing. According to the report by App Annie, video conferencing applications were downloaded over 62 million times from the App Store and Google Play during March 14-21.

Source: App Annie “Video Conferencing Apps Surge from Coronavirus Impact” by Lexi Sydow

Source: App Annie “Video Conferencing Apps Surge from Coronavirus Impact” by Lexi Sydow

• During the COVID-19 pandemic, people are spending a lot more time in their mobile finance and banking applications. It is noteworthy that customers often use them on a daily basis.

Source: App Annie “Economic Headwinds Prompt Demand for Finance Apps” by Lexi Sydow

• The time spent by users in smartphone apps for stock market monitoring and trading increased 80% during the outbreak.

Source: App Annie “Economic Headwinds Prompt Demand for Finance Apps” by Lexi Sydow

Currently, we are seeing a shift in business development strategies and priorities. To adapt to the new global situation, companies are seeking new ways to optimize costs, digitize internal processes, and engage the audience. A mobile application is one of the main tools to achieve these goals.

How can you benefit from building a mobile application?

1. E-learning: establish an effective education system for faster training and reduced costs

There are plenty of advantages that an e-learning application may bring. Imagine an international company with numerous branches across the globe that needs to train specialists from different countries and offices. It has established management processes, complex operations and document flows, integrated software, and now aims to quickly onboard new people considering job specifics.

To give them the desired skills and knowledge, an organization has to prepare multiple courses in different languages. Hiring instructors, translating the information into many languages, providing the required equipment and location are associated with huge investments and bureaucracy headaches. So, it’s better to create an e-learning app that will allow employees to learn from any place in the world.

With a mobile solution, you can offer the required information in text, audio, and video formats, prepare tests, monitor progress, and identify the best learners. Furthermore, you can fully customize courses to your needs. You will also save costs as you don’t have to pay a salary to teachers and purchase training facilities.

Augmented reality is being frequently incorporated into e-learning products. You can train workers using not printed manuals but AR-based mobile apps that provide 3D visualization of the desired materials. In the healthcare sector, for instance, this method is used to learn anatomy in a more rapid way.

2. Retail, E-commerce: open a new sales channel through an online delivery service

Users are increasingly shopping online, ordering food, buying groceries, clothes, and other things. Since few people are going to stores at the moment, business owners are focusing on process digitization: from upgrading (or creating from scratch) e-commerce stores to making mobile apps for delivery drivers.

You can build a smartphone solution that lets users purchase goods, track their status, receive notifications about shares and discounts, and communicate with managers.

If you have already had an e-commerce website, you can convert it into a mobile application or mobile site version. This will enable you to cover a larger audience and boost sales.

The COVID-19 is significantly affecting the retail industry. According to the survey by Digital Commerce 360 (March 2020), 22% of marketplace merchants are modifying their strategies to maintain operations during the pandemic.

While brick-and-mortar stores are closing, grocery delivery services are seeing hit business growth. Apptopia reports that app installs increased by 124%, 160%, and 216% for Shipt, Walmart Grocery, and Instacart respectively.

Source: Apptopia “Instacart and grocery delivery apps set consecutive days of record downloads” by Lexi Sydow

3. Healthcare: provide remote health monitoring and control

At the moment, we are witnessing healthcare digital transformation. Sensor technologies, biosensors, IoT-based devices, wearables, and smartphone apps are quickly transforming the industry, making it possible to remotely monitor user health.

Connecting sensors and wearables to mobile applications, medical organizations replace heavy expensive equipment with small devices. Accurate interpretation of health indicators and real-time statistics let doctors get the most detailed picture of the patient condition.

Smart medical devices such as smart inhalers, smart pills, syringe pens, and smart blister packs are becoming widely adopted in the healthcare sector. Working in conjunction with mobile apps, they significantly improve treatment.

For instance, biosensors are employed to measure pulse, heart rate, glucose level, arterial pressure, oxygen level, and a range of other important things.

People can stay at home instead of going to the hospital, share real-time reports with physicians, and get reminders of taking medicines. This will enable them to quickly detect health issues and prevent disease complications, as well as reduce the burden on doctors.

4. Financial services: improve customer experience and optimize operations

Nowadays financial services companies are building digital products to enhance customer experience, attract more clients, and optimize internal processes. Imagine a mobile app that allows users to make payments, see a history of transactions, pay bills, replenish and withdraw funds. With this pocket solution, your firm will not only increase customer service but also reduce employees’ workload.

Or you can create a mobile application that will enable you to collect user data, trace the most profitable exchange rates, manage risks, and provide customers with personalized consultations. You can also integrate professional analytic tools for traders to make them able to visualize data in real-time.

5. Audio and video conferencing, reporting: improve internal communications and integrate a convenient reporting system

Transparent communication and effective cooperation allow employees to faster perform tasks. When everyone has access to all the necessary documents, up-to-date information, and different ways of communication (emails, private and group chats, etc.), working issues are resolved much more quickly.

You can also improve a reporting system by enabling digital signatures, online document editing, and multiple pre-built report templates.

To ensure efficient employees’ collaboration, you can make a mobile application with the following features:

1. File sharing in different formats
2. Document creation, editing, commenting
3. Role-based data access
4. Audio and video calls
5. Scan-to-join meetings (users join the call via a QR-code that can be placed in the meeting room)
6. Private and group chats
7. Digital signatures
8. Newsfeed to notify users about the company’s and industry news, events, etc.

In addition, you can integrate polls and questionnaires to collect feedback from colleagues on multiple issues. For example, you can use a smartphone solution to occasionally ask employees what they enjoy about their job and what could be enhanced. This will help you establish a convenient working environment for everyone.

6. Remote collaboration: organize efficient remote work

Say, your business has a lot of field-workers, whose work has to be monitored. Or you want to organize efficient remote collaboration during the COVID-19. However, there is no system for collecting and synchronizing data, creating tasks, tracking spent time, and meeting all internal business needs, for example, various APIs have to be integrated.

A mobile app for project management will help you set up a convenient remote workflow. Offer the ability to see and update task statuses, view schedules, report issues, leave notes and comments. This will provide control over operations while you won’t have to personally ask everyone how the things are going.

If you have a web service of this kind, you can turn into a mobile application to give access to it from any device. Here we recommend launching a cross-platform solution—making only one app that runs on iOS and Android—to cut costs and automate the development process.