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App constellations 2018 research
I initially looked at app constellations back in 2014, when Fred Wilson put a name to the the phenomena. And every two years or so I have gone back and looked at a number of major internet companies to see how many different types of apps that they had in play.

I originally selected the companies back in 2014 because I felt that they represented the largest and best of their ilk. It skews Asian because the west can be viewed as one eco-system represented by Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

China is an enclosed eco-system; though Microsoft is actively engaged in the app eco-system there. I chose Tencent and NetEase as being my Chinese bellwethers. DaumKakao and Naver were representative of the Korean eco-system which blends highly-used domestic services with western platforms. Finally LINE of Japan (a subsidiary of Korean company Naver) provided a similar bellwether of the hybrid Japanese eco-system which mirrors Korea.

App constellations survey methodology

For the sake of convenience I have compared the contents of Apple’s mobile app store for each of the companies. While most of the internet companies have some Android-only or iOS-only apps; the iOS app store is still a good indicator of their app activity.

I stayed true to the definition of app constellations in terms of deciding what kind of app should go in.

I manually assessed each app, rather than relying on the category that the app had been submitted into. Tencent and Netease, had a number of mobile utilities that aided discussion and kept players updated on their favourite game. These didn’t fit within the definition.

Changes in the environment

Since 2016, a couple of things have changed:
- Apple had a purge of apps that didn’t support 64 bit processing
- They moved away from supporting the app store within iTunes application and on the web; to within the app store on the device
2018 marks over a decade of mobile apps in the Apple store. Many of the major players have delisted almost as many Android and iOS apps as they currently have in the store. This happens for a number of reasons:
- The app was serving a purpose for a fixed time
- It is an application that has fallen so far out of favour that it is no longer worth maintaining
- The code base no longer meets Apple’s or Google’s minimum standards
Data analysis

I started off by looking at the number of apps. In terms of app constellations: Tencent, Microsoft and Google were clear winners.

Both Microsoft and Google’s growth has been driven by ‘experimental’ apps that they have put out in the public for their own reasons and enterprise focused apps.

But it was quickly apparent to me that the number of apps developed were only part of the story. What about the rate of change in numbers of apps developed? This would be indicative of the rate of change in moving to mobile. Here both Facebook and Microsoft’s pivot became immediately apparent. The Asian companies looked less impressive as they had been able to keep steady in their focus on mobile.

All of this growth in the number of apps developed by major internet companies is all the more remarkable when you consider the following:
- In mature markets consumers are not really downloading new apps
- They are sticking with a few in terms of regular usage. Many of the apps on their phones don’t get used
Notes on a few of the companies in terms of their app constellations
- Daum Kakao – notable for being the only company who I looked at who had a decline in the number of applications versus 2016. A lot of this seems to be in service consolidation of both Daum and Kakao to remove duplications or non-core services. It is the Daum brand that has taken the biggest impact. This is understandable, since Daum struggled on the move to smartphones and Kakao is a mobile-first brand.
- Dropbox – the growth in apps has been down to the larger business acquisition strategy at Dropbox. I don’t expect further growth like what we have seen with Facebook’s pivot to mobile
- Facebook – Facebook’s pivot to mobile was one of the reason why I decided to look at compound annual growth rate as well as the size of app constellation in terms of app numbers. In terms of raw app ‘SKUs’ Facebook is dwarfed by most of the other companies that I have looked at. It is only by looking at the growth in apps developed where one can really see their move to mobile
- Netease – was interesting for its focus in a couple of areas. Like other Asian internet companies, education was a big target area, but Netease went into it with major commitment. Both NetEase and Tencent were big in magazine and book apps as well. I think this is down to the fact that ‘traditional’ web surfing is harder to do with (at the moment) when URLs are written in western script and numbers.
- Tencent – the raw app numbers beggars belief. There are a number of reasons for this. Like NetEase, Tencent has a lot of apps solely optimised for the iPad and a separate iPhone app. There are free and paid-for product variants. Lastly Tencent will have four or five apps competing in a given category like streaming music which seems insane. Only time will tell if Tencent is spreading itself too thin; like when Yahoo! was described Brad Garlinghouse’s Peanut Butter Manifesto
More information

Jargon watch: app constellation – back in 2014 when I wrote this post, it still took me the best part of a week to research and describe each of the apps in the main eco-systems. It would take me much longer today due to the growth in apps

Peanut Buttergate – analysis of Garlinghouse’s original memo about Yahoo! from back in 2006
April 12, 2018
Voice activated coupon + more news

Voice activated coupon

Google’s First Voice Activated Coupon – WPP – Google distributed its first voice-activated coupon offering customers $15 off Target purchases placed on Google Express through Google Assistant –through desktop, mobile or Google Assistant enabled devices – I am surprised that Amazon didn’t introduce the voice activated coupon before Google.

Beauty

SK-II finds success in selling to younger Chinese: P&G | Advertising | Campaign Asia – luxury brand with an on ramp for college students

China

China Bans Online Bible Sales as It Tightens Religious Controls – The New York Times – I am concerned about Vatican appeasement of China. It looks like Neville Chamberlain

Consumer behaviour

Headline from China: Purchase Restriction and Red Streetwear | Jing Daily – interesting how streetwear brands are being cleared out of the way by the Chinese government to support Chinese originated brands

How Americans Self-Sort Themselves by Age and Class – CityLab

Culture

The Overwhelming Emotion of Hearing Toto’s “Africa” Remixed to Sound Like It’s Playing in an Empty Mall | The New Yorker

Molly Ringwald Revisits “The Breakfast Club” in the Age of #MeToo | The New Yorker – good read, what I remember is how those films nailed emotion

Japan

Japan to place accident liability on self-driving car owners – Nikkei Asian Review – makers liable only in case of a system flaw

Online

China’s Didi Chuxing prepares to launch Mexico operations | HKEJ Insights – China going global

RSS is undead | Techcrunch – no RSS is alive, but Techcrunch haven’t worked out issues the RSS users have already. Much of the issues are solved by using NewsBlur and finding sources is organic rather than an instant end state. More online related topics here.

Security

Could Cambridge Analytica boss be probed for Philippine meddling? | SCMP – This could get interesting. Putting aside arguments about whether Cambridge Analytica’s technology actually works as promised, Philippines law would still have been broken. It forbids all outside parties from participating in its election process.It is alleged that they were supporting Duterte, which would make the foreign reaction to it interesting as well.

Technology

ARM Mac: Piece of Cake Or Gas Refinery? – Monday Note – assumes that there will be a transition, which I am not convinced about

API and Other Platform Product Changes – Facebook for Developers – reduces information that can be taken out to beef up privacy

Wireless

Smartphone shipments fall again in Q1 | Shanghai Daily – China looks saturated in terms of smartphones

Cell Spotting: Studying the Role of Cellular Networks in the Internet by Rula, Bustamante and Steiner – (PDF)

April 11, 2018
Erooms Law – jargon watch

Erooms Law is a metaphor that compares other business processes to the virtuous circle of Moore’s Law. It is literally Moore’s Law in reverse. Industries have developed processes that are getting ever more expensive. Once could consider that is inversely proportional to the way semiconductor manufacture reduced the relative cost of computing power over time.

Some see this as a potential opportunity for the use of computing in a sector to reduce costs. As with most circumstances, what seems like a great idea inside an Excel spreadsheet doesn’t work out in the real world. But that doesn’t stop the management consultants, investment bankers or venture capitalists from trying.

Eroom’s Law and the pharmaceutical industry

The poster child for Erooms Law cited would be the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry developing new drugs.

Here’s how Nature Reviews Drug Discovery put it:

Eroom’s Law indicates that powerful forces have outweighed scientific, technical and managerial improvements over the past 60 years, and/or that some of the improvements have been less ‘improving’ than commonly thought. The more positive anyone is about the past several decades of progress, the more negative they should be about the strength of countervailing forces. If someone is optimistic about the prospects for R&D today, they presumably believe the countervailing forces — whatever they are — are starting to abate, or that there has been a sudden and unprecedented acceleration in scientific, technological or managerial progress that will soon become visible in new drug approvals.

You could argue that the defence industry would also fall into this, despite the benefits of technology. (The origins of the semiconductor industry lie in the development of missiles during the cold war. Integrated circuit technology is more robust and lighter than discrete transistors or vacuum tube based systems).

Other areas were Erooms Law is prevalent include fintech or financial technology and the automotive sector, where massive assumptions are made about the rate of innovation in battery technology based on Moore’s Law rather than the rather prosaic improvements in materials science that underpin existing battery chemistry.

More information

Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency | Nature Reviews Drug Discovery (paywall)
Eroom’s Law | In the Pipeline | Science magazine
EROOM’s Law of Pharma R & D | buildingpharmabrands
More posts on the pharmaceutical industry on this blog.

April 10, 2018
Discussion on voice interfaces and services
Interesting discussion on the use of voice interfaces and services. There is a certain amount of cheerleading involved in the talk; but that is to be expected with vendors in the room. If found it interesting that one of the panelists; Sam Liang of AISense moved out of where2.0 services and into voice. because location is a great gateway to lots of rich contextual information and voice is desperately in need of context and by extension user intent.

It is interesting to get a perspective on the organisations involved in the discussion on voice interfaces:
- SRI International
- Amazon
- Microsoft
- AISense
All of them seem to be well behind where the telecoms voice services managed to get to like Orange’s Wildfire.

Key takeouts from this:
- 50,000,000 voice devices to ship this year (2018). A total installed user base of 100,000,000 (presumably excluding voice interfaces on smartphones)
- AISense is looking to build in voice biometrics that would prompt you about who a person is. Privacy implications are profound
- The panel struggled to articulate an answer to privacy concerns beyond ‘services need to build trust’ and transparency
- Information security and hacking wasn’t a point of discussion; which surprised me a lot
- Context still seems to be a huge issue, I think that this is a bigger issue than the panelists acknowledge. Google still struggles on user intent, without adding the additional layer of understanding voice. The biggest moves seem to be ‘social engineering’ hacks, rather than improvements in technology
- Amazon and Microsoft don’t have plans for advertising services on voice (at the moment)
- We’re very far away from general purpose voice services
- Work has only started on trying to understand emotion
More information
- Orange’s Wildfire and The Register on its shutdown. Wildfire’s problem seemed to be a failure of marketing more than anything else. We haven’t seen anything else like it. Even Siri is only scraping over the ashes of the work done on Wildfire 15 years ago
- Google’s published research on speech processing. What becomes apparent from looking at the list of research is how basic the current state-of-the-art currently is
- Stuff that I have written that touch on context dependent services
April 8, 2018
Global Web Index + more news

Global Web Index data on privacy

1 in 4 Deeply Concerned About Online Privacy – GlobalWebIndex Blog – ok its Global Web Index so you have to take the data with a pinch of salt. Global Web Index is based on people completing online surveys. That means that the technique Global Web Index uses needs to be considered alongside the data. It isn’t observed behaviour, but reported behaviour. One might do one thing and say another. The extremely high rate of concern in Latin America in the Global Web Index survey could be a sampling error on the survey or it could be quite profound given that it would be a growth market for social media networks like Facebook

Business

WPP Appoints Independent Counsel to Investigate Allegations of ‘Personal Misconduct’ Against CEO Martin Sorrell – Adweek – by the sounds of it the share price drop was disproportionate to the size of misuse involved

Marketing

ANA finds only 36% of marketers say their influencer marketing is effective | The Drum – research says what people know but won’t talk about

Not a simple process’: Marketers struggle to recruit in-house media talent – Digiday – what’s depressing about this is not the media side of things but is how screwed brand is with in-house marketers

Media

YouTube will now monetize on skipped ads | Digital | Campaign Asia – interesting how a brand marketing metric (CPM) is recharacterised as a ‘vanity measure’

Online

The death of the newsfeed — Benedict Evans – or why western social platforms may learn from WeChat’s user experience

OPPO Digital – giving up making hi-fi and high end Blu-Ray players – a bit sad as OPPO made high-end headphones and arguably the best multi-region Blu-Ray players that money could buy

Security

Privacy fears over police spy tools that can break into mobile phones | News | The Times – The technology was first introduced by the Metropolitan Police for the London Olympics in 2012 and has been quietly rolled out. Privacy International’s report says police are operating without any clear legal framework and often break into phones belonging to people who have not been convicted of any crime, including witnesses and victims

Technology

Let’s take a moment to appreciate all the lies in Zuckerberg’s truths about Tim Cook and Apple – BGR – interesting tonality in this article which gives you an idea of the temperament vintage Microsoft enjoyed in the technology media. Expect Facebook to start emphasising their innovative nature soon…

We put Huawei’s P20 triple-lens snapper through its paces • The Register – basically keep your old phone and download VSCO. Interesting a wider phone review wasn’t done. Says a lot about market saturation and performance differences per handset generation. More related content here.

April 7, 2018