The evolution (past, present and future) of mobile apps and the App Store

[Music] I've got a fancy presentation so I'm gonna have to use that to Pickers so bear with me for this good morning my name is Paul Wes I'm VP of Amir hop on board and today we're going to talk about the evolution of the AppStore past present and future and where we're headed and I'd like to kick off the presentation jointly with a quote so trust and attention these are the scarce items in a post-scarcity world and I think this quote perfectly sums up our industry and many others today in regards to when consumers are surrounded by choice have an abundance of choice then trust it harder for businesses and brands to maintain and keep hold of I'm

going to show why this is relevant for the App Store so where did we start if we think about 10 years ago this is the the original design of the App Store interesting to see a show of hands of who was developing apps like 10 years ago maybe like hands up good there's a couple hopefully some nostalgia hits you as you walk down memory lane of designing apps for the App Store even to where we are today obviously lots of visual changes lots more curated imagery same on the Android Market which was the original name for the Google Play Store we saw many more designs reiterations as we approached to where we are today and you think as we move forward to where we are now there's much more than just visual changes in the stores and we like to compare exactly what the physical changes are behind in terms of infrastructure so there are two factors here that are super relevant and in our opinion one there's market dynamic shifts and two there's and the second

point is regards to the infrastructure changes the technology advancements if you look at ten years ago the entrants field for an apple developer was $99 and today that's a really small barrier to entry for a developer and naturally we've seen huge success with smartphones globally so our huge rise in apps available and the demand over a over 2.2 million apps are available in iOS store it gets 500 million visitors a week and there's 130 billion downloads today over the last 10 yes so this growth is obviously extremely we know this the second point is on the Technic technological improvements so the farside cellular limit of an original happened in thousand eight was ten megabytes to be a distri man download every cellular now it's a hundred and fifty megabytes and even the size of the apks on the stores have increased a 4 gigabyte now we have four gigabyte games available to download so these two things in in my opinion have moved the friction points for developers and I've actually made things just as challenging in a

different way on the Google Play Store we see the same same scale same growth we all aware of this and actually we've introduced pricing share pricing options from the platform's discoverability methods such as you know paid search etc to kind of trying to identify the good apps it in although the apps that we want within this ecosystem we think the original tagline for the App Store is there's an app for everything now there's about 100 for everything then there's kind of more of sectors that have emerged in you know in our industry to try and help extract that value ASO of course being a major factor coming and growing over the last couple of years I think it's quite clear to see that the app stores have created a new user behavior we now live in an on-demand world if we think about the industries and the businesses around us that we use every day and not a growing these are companies that are minimizing mineralizing friction to solve real world consumer challenges and these are all familiar I'm sure around the world

that companies like this are emerging and getting a lot of excitement and fundraising and of course revenue so the question remains why aren't ups on demand that's what the question that Apple board is asking why don't we need to download a 2 gigabyte file to know if we if we want to play that game we see premium experiences coming to mobile more than ever but the likes of thought and soul games coming into the into the market and this presents kind of a new challenge this is the apk size growth of apps over the last five years and it's as you can see that's kind of consistent growth of file sizes so this is the new friction point that used to be a paywall ten years ago and obviously this apk size does bring distribution challenges Eric touched on it briefly earlier in terms of the changes in emerging markets well we've got something from the Google from the Google Blog which shows that when you reduce the the file size of your apk during the install rate goes up when your store page kind of makes sense

but here's the actual numbers from the Google Play Store a one and a half percent increase on your conversion funnel from store page visits when you drop your file size apk by 10 megabytes which is pretty significant if you think of the lifetime of your app and the scale of that funnel that everyone in this room kind of acquires so of course we don't make big apps for the sake of it these are the apps are getting larger because they're more premium experiences they're higher quality assets so Google of comics solution Google Play instant and this is talking specifically around the try now can I just have a show of hands who's familiar in the room with to try now ok cool around 30 30 % interesting so try now is there's a new feature from Google which is available to everyone where you can upload a small apk under 10 megabytes is that is the file size limit and it will prompt a it will allow you to have a try Now button on your store page so the goal of this of course is to is to increase increase conversion and increase the quality of user that you are you're acquiring or

using on your storefront so upon board specializes in creating these experiences our technology is very well-suited to create premium experiences that are under 10 megabytes I'd like to show you one this is one we've built for the game intro team guns of boom and here we go so you can see a couple of things a video really doesn't do it justice I come and see one of our guys will show you that in person to play you can see it's all included in the Google Play

ecosystem will the official API is etc and their core the most important factor is quality this lives on the storefront on the store page this needs to be as high quality as possible to give your consumer the best experience available if you think about the quote earlier what better way of getting a consumers attention and Trust then giving them an instant experience of the best element of your product so we've seen significant demand for this product since we started working with Google halfway through the end of last year and I would like to show you kind of another element to this of why it's so effective we decide by side comparison with comparing a product whether try now and without a try now just to show you the intent to play and the time it takes for a consumer so on the left-hand side we have a try now available we're gonna search for CSR racing 2 on the right hand side the try now won't be available well load it up in the Google Play Store and you actually go into the store front page and you see the try Now button is on the left here and on the left here and we'll tap that so the demo owns an tab under

10 megabyte file is downloading and it kicks open me experience of CSI particle effects they're the reflections and everything is all there and the user is able to play in a and a half seconds on the right-hand side the current flow is kind of what I want this to you right now downloading a two gigabyte game can take some time this is of course on Wi-Fi so we're gonna speed up the right-hand side ATX I can see actually to get to that same segment that same kind of user experience you can see where frictions been massively reduced or slightly increased on the right side is up in with seven minutes to get to that same point so it's 50x faster with a try now and if you think about kind of the modern world and the the post-scarcity of it there's so much abundant so much choice for consumers this minimizing friction and marginal gains is going to become more and more important and even on the flow of a of the current the current version of dining it out you do have lots of many friction barriers which many gamers are probably used to

but these are the things I kind of avoided to get the player to the content faster and you think of the drop-off point within seven minutes maybe they're finished in the queue for that coffee or whatever the scenario maybe this is where kind of the growth can come from in there and in the future the question everyone asks is you know how after is very these are some google case studies that are live you can go and check these out on the Google store King hothead alien shooter from from one soft and played ticker these have all showed the the results of their kind of use of try now some of the some of the key ones to call out hothead with mighty battles resolved in a increase of new acquisitions by nineteen percent by using our try now and one self-report install increases in Germany of 30 percent by using try now so definitely super effective one of our case studies which we put out at the end of last year's with Jam City make a jam blast they saw an increase significant increase in LTV so they measured their day one and day seven retention of users who came through the trial of users who

didn't come through the try now and they saw an up to 30% increase on day one and day seven retention if you think about what changes you need to do to your product to action that and this is actually no development required to do this up on board produced these themselves for ourselves for developers so it's actually quite nice outsource fix for improving increasing product metrics this isn't just available for freemium games this is available for paid games available for non gaming and there's a lot of scope in terms of potential with with this experience it's kind of longer than the ten megabytes you can pretty much do whatever you like to convince your user to be an installer and a good user it's interesting to note actually over the past even past couple of months how the Google Play Store shifted again so this was the original when we launched I announce with these partners this is what their store page looked like and now we can see that the visual banners the imagery is all gone and the number one call to action now on the storefront is try now and these are become more and more important as I as we move forward

in terms of optimizing and and really increasing that funnel so that's that's present I think what's quite interesting to talk about the future and what's going to be available with with the app stores and mobile distribution moving forward there's a lot of things that are kind of emerging technologies that will influence the App Store in my opinion there's a lot of good talks at this event on blockchain in itself we've got things such as VRA our wearables voice search could all these things play a big factor in our future kind of distribution I like to focus on things that are within our control so control our controllables and these are the four I'm going to dilute down to to talk to you about which are almost available right now or coming very soon so let's talk about new services so a quick show of hands who's familiar with the Google Play games has any ones up if you know of it or aware of it okay it's about 10% it looks like so I did not know of this app until a couple of couple of months ago but it has over a billion installs it's Google owned and operated service and product and it's basically Google

Play games it's the game store for quite for accessing new new products it's almost like a game launcher and there's new content curated that's surfaced to users who go and get their games from this service and one of the interesting we've noticed how instant gameplay is a big section within this within this this kind of storefront and Google are surfacing more and more touch points for organic installs and users of their try now service so this is a really interesting element not just to measure the try now impact on your store page elsewhere where your users are coming from by using this instant app join our experience in Pais impossible not to comment on the new routes to market that are available we touched on earlier how epic are launching an ios and android store of favorable developer rates and netflix have navigated round the the payment processes on the app stores themselves to be web only and make that extra 30% these things are also kind of out of our control as developers in this room but it seemed

court important to keep an eye on these trends what i really want to talk about is things that are actionable right now like tomorrow so pre-launch campaigns is available on iOS and Android and is growing to be an important factor the success of broad stars from supercell was a four million pre-registrations on day one and think of that as a as a hit list straight away to get a notification out even with a ten percent conversion rate us a lot of installers to launch with we did a test with with a LA based studio who launched their product into pre-registration before the game goes live and they saw over 10,000 pre-registrations per day on their product so you can be in pre-registration for 90 days it's available to everyone before you launch your product it's a great way to collect that day one launch strategy and an execution for when you kick off another important element is when we think about there's a lot of marketers in the room I imagine in terms of you a sources what's the best you a source maybe people will shout platforms or networks at me but I

think we all probably agree as marketers that word-of-mouth is critical and super hard to measure but super valuable well this is another way that they try now experience is going to enhance kind of share ability and morality within apps moving forward here I get a text from my wife actually I got a text which says hey I think you'll like this game go and take a look just a simple URL you tuck the URL instantly kicks open the demo CSR to again instantly kicks open the demo three seconds four seconds in on the right hand side we saw earlier take seven minutes to get that same experience so this is one way to help you know spread the word much much faster and all we did on the left hand side if you have a try now available in your Google Play page you just add and launch or Ambus and launch onto the URL and that's the link so you can think about new ways to market your product with even old-school SMS marketing with this instant effectiveness and we talked about kind of large wraps it's not just effective on large large games this is a time stamp we deal against some of the

biggest games in the world biggest products in the world one apps you can see that even at the likes of candy crush level where they're like 200 to 300 megabytes it's 9 to 10 times faster having a try now available to get to the game content like the product after that's something that all the stores are working on to kind of move towards a seamless approach but this is super effective right now in terms of marginal games I'm building the the trust and attention in a world where we're surrounded by choice and this is what this is one of my favorite quotes ever ever actually this is from Jeff Bezos and I'm gonna result things it's a little long but if you haven't heard it this is really valuable if you have I think it's helpful to read so we listen to this so Jeff Bezos on Amazon said I very frequently get the question what's going to change in the next 10 years and it's a very interesting question and it's a very common one I almost never get the question what's not going to change in the next 10 years and I submit to you that that second question is actually more important of the two because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time in our retail business we

know that customers want low prices and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now they want fast delivery and they want vast selection it's impossible to imagine the future 10 years from now where a customer comes up to us and says Jeff I love Amazon I just wish the prices were a little higher well Jeff I love Amazon I just wish it took a little longer to deliver so that's impossible and so the effort that they put into those things spinning those things up they know that the energy they put in today will pay be paying back dividend mature so when you have something you know is true even over the long term you can afford to put a lot of energy into it now he's very smart man and I've obviously used his words there but I think that's really relevant or in our industry today and especially where Apple Board places itself within the ecosystem we are our technology actually puts us within the the middle of consumers developers and platforms and we can't imagine that you know consumers will be coming up to us in ten years time and saying I wish file sizes were larger so we can fit less them on our device we can't imagine platform owner coming up to us and saying hey we wish it took longer for our consumers to

download products especially over 6 g or 7 g or whatever it is in 10 years time and we especially don't think that developers will be coming up to us and saying we wish it took us longer to build an app so that's exactly where Apple board is investing we're investing in a future where our zero code solution can reduce the friction for developers platformers platforms and consumers so thank you very much hopefully we have some time for any questions well [Applause] [Music] [Music] you