Businesses that make money through their apps are coming under pressure as people’s attention span for apps shortens, a survey has claimed.
Nearly half of UK smartphone and tablet users are getting less tolerant of problems with apps as they admit their expectations of them are growing, according to a study by AppDynamics.
The application intelligence firm commissioned a survey of 1,000 Britons who own a smartphone or tablet, carried out by Goldsmiths, University of London, and found that a quarter of respondents believe they are more loyal to an app than a brand.
More than a quarter of people said they would use another app if they experienced slow performance, while 58% stated that flawless performance was most crucial when using banking apps – though high street banks suffered glitches with their mobile apps back in February.
Nearly one-third added that they would pay more for an app if it performed better than its rivals, while the research reported people’s biggest frustration to be slow performance.
Dr Chris Brauer, director of innovation for the Institute of Management Studies at Goldsmiths, said: "Our attention span demands have adapted dramatically to the available technologies. Users experience a lot of negative emotions and frustrations when trying to complete some digital tasks and apps or web pages are slow to load."
Nearly half of Britons reported suffering an app crash in the past 12 months.
The news comes as tech firms respond to businesses’ desire to build and develop their own apps, for customer or employees.
BlackBerry recently refocused on the enterprise sector, stating its desire to become the provider for all aspects of mobility for firms with its BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES) 10 and the upcoming BES12.
VP for Europe, Markus Mueller, said: "We want to become the true mobility platform provider for everything within the enterprise and obviously part of that everything might also be that you create your own mobile apps, and we want to be the enabler for that."
