Wait, T-mobile has another app?
One fine Tuesday, December last year, my friend and I had gone to Subway to grab lunch. We were standing in the queue when we heard the guy ahead mention some sort of offer for T-mobile users, through which he was gonna get his sub for free! My friend and I, both being T-mobile users, decided to try it out and get free lunch for the day. So, we asked the guy the procedure to redeem the offer and he was like go to their app and just click on redeem. So, my friend opened the official T-mobile app, but couldn’t find the offers section anywhere. Seeing us struggle, the guy looked at what we were doing and said, “not this one, it’s their other app”. And we were like, T-mobile has another app?!!
So turns out T-mobile has made a separate app just for their T-mobile Tuesdays offers. But is making the customers download another app just for the sake of redeeming the offers good idea? Well, at first doesn’t seem so, but let’s get a bit into the details.
Usually, T-mobile users like us have the official T-mobile app. This main app is useful for checking balance of our cellular data or for viewing and paying our bills. It being the official app of T-mobile, we naturally expected the app to contain the offers, at the most having a separate section for them. But, as it turns out T-mobile has decided to ‘unbundle’ the offers feature into another standalone app.
Let’s compare it to something a bit similar like the PNC bank app. Though they might seem totally different, the primary function of both these apps is to show account balance and let the users perform tasks related to their account. I’ve been using the PNC bank app for more than 6 months, and only recently I found out about the offers section in the app. And it’s not that I never use the app, I use it almost daily, to check my balance, to take a note of the daily transactions and to transfer money in-between my accounts. The app doesn’t try to show the offers section(or the reward center as they call it), anywhere upfront, it’s quietly tucked down a drill down navigation hidden inside the hamburger menu.
So maybe having a separate app does help putting a particular feature in the spotlight.
If you look at the reviews for the T-mobile Tuesdays app on the App Store, they are mixed to negative, with some people calling it a ‘useless app’ or ‘something which is useful only on one day out of the whole week’. And on the other hand few others praising it for providing these offers which otherwise might’ve been missed by them and thus doing the job nicely.
But that’s the thing with unbundling. On one hand it adds the redundancy of having to download and keep an app, thus adding to the already cluttered home screen and the almost nearly full internal storage. And gives rise to doubts like, will people even find about this separate app? Or will they download just the main app and spend eternity wondering where that particular feature is?
Whereas, on the other hand, it helps to draw the users’ attention to the feature, thus promoting it explicitly. Add to that the fact that it helps reduce options in the main app, thus simplifying it, and also gives us the liberty to add extra stuff to the new standalone app of that feature.
So, yes, unbundling has its pros and cons, but then should it be done? Well, according to me it depends on the type of app and the kind of feature, in this case creating a separate app just for promoting their offers might seem redundant, but it’s actually a very important strategic move both for the design as well as the business aspect.
According to me it depends on the type of app and the kind of feature
Creating a separate app shows how much they care about this scheme of theirs, thus helping them get more partners for their scheme. And thus helping them bring in more investment for it. As for their customer relationship, it’s equally important, since it proves to be a great way of showing how much they value their customers and their inclination to rewarding them just for using their service.
And as far as downloading another app is concerned, in this case people will readily do it, since people are more than willing to take more efforts to get stuff for free, after all who doesn’t like free stuff?
So, I feel T-mobile has done a wonderful job in this case unbundling their app, resulting in them getting more business partners as well as customers, thus helping increment all their revenue streams.
