The rip-roaring success of Pokemon Go has put apps front and centre over the past couple of weeks. The experts are divided as to whether the mobile app will continue to go from strength to strength and dominate our lives for years to come, or whether the mobile web will catch up and become sufficiently usable and well designed as to render apps superfluous.
Here at Tibus, our view is that it is all about the application, has been for some time and will continue to be so. The research in this area (albeit some of it is now up to four years old) suggests that we are right in that belief. In 2012, comScore found that 82% of mobile usage is via apps. More recent data from Nielsen in 2014 revealed that 89% of time is spent on apps, compared to 11% on the mobile web.
That’s handy for us because we’ve carved out something of a niche in providing managed app hosting for clouds.
If you’re launching a new application, giving serious though to how it’s hosted - or at least having an expert give serious consideration on your behalf - is absolutely essential. The Pokemon Go success story shows how, when you get it right, an app can go viral overnight. You need to have a scalable infrastructure in place to cope with a sudden influx of new users. Ideally, you will also want to have in place a support structure for your app, if you don’t have that technical expertise in house.
That’s where some of the big boys of cloud hosting fall short when it comes to the requirements of the average app developer. They provide ample space in which the application can live - computing capacity and flexibility - but they don’t really offer support (and especially not the sort of hands-on, proactive support that a successful app might need).
By contrast, we offer 24/7 managed application support, including a range of a la carte support features to allow our customers to get the appropriate level of assistance from us. Our support services cover everything from very modest monitoring and reporting, right through to complex code authoring and debugging.
We use metrics grounded in user experience, such as time in the app, sales, adverts served, click-through rate and referrals, to provide our customers with evidence that their app is performing correctly.
