End of the Web, Era of the App?

When the mobile revolution happened, it was cited as an example of how places like India and Africa bypassed landlines and went directly to cellphones. Then came the smartphone and it, says Steven Sinofsky, has continued the trend of helping poorer countries leapfrog to the next level:

“Smartphones skipped over the PC. Mobile banking skipped over plastic cards and banks.”

People like us (who have both PC’s and smartphones) would assume that Sinfosky’s point about smartphones skipping the PC in many countries doesn’t apply to India. Think again.

Smartphones drive so much business, and conversely PC’s drive so little of it, that Flipkart has decided to shut down their website within a year. In other words, all their business would be via the smartphone (and tablet) app alone! Michael Adnani, Flipkart’s VP of retail, gives the numbers:

“A year ago, 6% of our traffic was coming from mobile. In less than 18 months, that traffic is 10-fold.”

10-fold increase! That’s 60%! Wow! Another reason behind Flipkart’s decision is where they ship the most: smaller towns:

“Of Flipkart’s 8 million monthly shipments, about two-thirds come from users in small towns and cities, where consumers likely have limited access to desktop computers and broadband Internet.”

And if Internet speeds are low in those places, then a smartphone app actually has some advantages:

“An app allows a user to stay logged in while updates and other information are efficiently and constantly downloaded, ready for consumption almost instantly. It is, in fact, perfect for low-bandwidth situations.”

So does this mean the end of the Web? Are we now in the era of the app? Eugene Wei puts it perfectly when he wrote:

“Many people in India, China, and other parts of the world, where bandwidth is low and slow, and where mobile phones are their one and only computer, have no room for such sentimentality. They may never have experienced the same heyday of the web, so they feel no analogous nostalgia for it as a medium.”

And so, ends Wei:

“In the U.S., many tech companies were lauded as pioneers for going mobile first when in Asia companies are already going mobile only. In some ways, Asia feels like it lives in the past as compared to the U.S., especially when one sees so many fast followers of successful U.S. technology companies, but in a surprisingly large number of ways, Asia lives in our near future.”