Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Samar Singla, CEO of Click-Labs (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How much of this kind of work is happening on mobile apps versus on a regular web application?

Samar Singla: A lot of our work is server side. I would say almost all of these are mobile first. When they get traction, they typically start something on the web. Essentially, it is more than 80% mobile first.

Sramana Mitra: What is your general feeling about this mobile first strategy on this scale? The mobile platforms are getting very crowded with apps. Everybody wants to have an app on the mobile, but it’s not a very good user interface.

Samar Singla: I would argue that it is better than web because when you do something on a website, you have to open the website every time. It’s not very sticky. Typically what people would do on the website is they would search on Google what the brand name is.

Sramana Mitra: From your customer’s point of view, mobile may be attractive. From the consumer point of view, if you clutter up my mobile device with so many apps, I think it’s a terrible user experience.

Samar Singla: The data says otherwise. Take Uber. Take any app that has mobile app and a mobile web interface. More than 95% of usage is mobile.

Sramana Mitra: Uber is very diferent. Uber is one of the top apps.

Samar Singla: You can take any app. If it’s not 95%, it will definitely be 80%. One exception is content consumption. I’m not talking about magazines there. They are just really doing apps for apps sake. When the focus of a company is to just feed content, apps are not really effective. Web is better. If you’re doing something that is context-aware, apps are almost always better. Look at any other marketplace. You will see that apps are almost always 80%, with the exception of situations where the only purpose of the app is content consumption.

Sramana Mitra: I don’t completely buy what you’re saying. The reason being I really don’t want that many apps on my phone. If you have 15 pages worth of apps and the screen size is tiny, finding an app is a nightmare.

Samar Singla: That’s the reason why the second trend of organizing the apps is going on. Look at Aviate, which Yahoo bought last year. This is not a matter of liking it or not. This is a matter of is it happening or not. The fact is, it’s happening. The solution is that you organize the apps in a better way. Apple is bad at that, but Android is being open about it. Aviate is a very good way to organize apps, for example.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Samar Singla, CEO of Click-Labs
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