Where will the software long tail go?
Web, native, or messenger apps? It’s wise to hedge your bets.
Think back, long ago, before the browser became your most-used desktop application. Most of us didn’t use many pieces of software. There were a few applications that nearly everybody had and used frequently (Office), and a few other things that were not universal but still popular and received heavy use (Sim City, The Secret of Monkey Island).
There wasn’t really much of a long tail for software — unless you count the weird stuff that came on the cover of magazines, or that you could send off for from shareware catalogs.
The Web created a software long tail
The Web provided a platform for millions of online services that weren’t for everyone, weren’t used all that often — but were still useful, important, and profitable. Doctors could let you book in. Niche stores could sell their products. Utilities could offer customer support. Plumbers could tout for business. And many, many other use cases rolled out across millions of small organizations around the world.
(At Packt we rode and supported this wave of long tail software on the web: We published books that helped provide useful services on the Web. First with Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, and their ilk. And then with Ajax, jQuery, and AngularJS.)
Eventually the desktop Web was so good that even the head — the popular software products that everybody used — lived on the Web too. Billion-user web apps like Google.com, Facebook.com, Hotmail.com. Applications that everybody used all the time, hosted on the Web. Not long ago it even looked like word processers and spreadsheets were on their way to becoming web apps too.
Mobile and the native head
Then mobile app stores came and changed all that.
The head has already gone native. Those massively popular high engagement sites are being replaced by massively popular high engagement mobile apps.
But for the long tail native doesn’t work so well. Most people only use 10 apps per month — and mainly it’s the same 10 apps as everybody else: Facebook, messaging, a few games. We don’t want to carry around an app in our pocket all the time just to buy our annual insurance or book a quarterly business trip. We want these apps to be available when we need them, instantly, but not clutter our devices when we don’t.
There’s still a long tail of services that I want to access through software. Where will the long tail go?
Three futures…
Digging around, there seems to be broadly three options, with different backers:
- The Web will evolve to provide a better, faster stickier experience, like native apps. Accelerated Mobile Pages, Service Workers, and a swathe of other technologies intend to bring the Web experience up to date with mobile.
- Native will evolve to provide ‘on demand’ apps that are easily discoverable and require no installation, like web apps. Perhaps Android and iOS will evolve their native platforms away from the current app store model — apps will become more like web sites, where you can find and use them as you need them, without installation. It’s hard to see much sign of this happening, yet. Google’s deep app search and linking is heading this way.
- Another kind of app will replace the browser as the container for long tail software services. In Asia this has already happened. WeChat, Line, and Kakao are the way that Asians use software services. Slack, Facebook Messenger, Kik, Telegram and Whatsapp are so valuable because they’re possibly the software and services platform of the future. The core Facebook app, with its pages and Instant Articles, might also evolve in this direction. Or perhaps Google Now, or Siri.
Which will win? Where will the long tail of software go? That’s a fun topic to debate but the truth is nobody knows. Wise developers — and publishers — will hedge their bets so they can succeed in all three possible futures. But the worst thing you can do is assume things will stay the same, because by the time the future is clear it will already be too late to change.
Where do you think the software long tail will go, and what are you doing about it? Respond!
