Monetising Apps with Advertising

According to the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index, Facebook has suffered a significant drop in customer satisfaction, and is now close to the bottom of the heap, along with Linked in.

The drop in satisfaction ratings may be related to the level of advertising on the sites. Google+ for example, lost ground last year, but appears to have recovered some ground;

“A sharp increase in search engine advertising contributed to a drop in user satisfaction last year, but Google’s latest change to the way ads are labeled, along with its focus on the mobile user experience, may be steps in the right direction,” said [ACSI director] VanAmburg

If there is no in-app or web site advertising, sites and iPhone apps and Android apps which rely on advertising for revenue wouldn’t make any money – but the satisfaction surveys are a warning to businesses which rely on advertising revenue, not to push the envelope too hard. Because there is always a competitor eager to offer your customers a better user experience.

Thinking back to my old Sony Ericcson P990, back in the mid noughties, I would have loved to replace it with an Android phone.

The P990 was a geek phone. It had no battery life, but it had an amazing array of features. I once reconfigured it to use an international dial up internet connection, to post an email from a beach in Thailand, where no mobile internet was available (at the time). You can’t do that with a modern phone. But the P990 was in my opinion utterly unusable, unless you knew an awful lot about IT.

Compared to that, Android is a dream for ordinary users – most of the functions can be accessed without arcane messing with the settings, the app paradigm is simple and intuitive – what could be better?

The answer of course is iPhone. I tried switching my wife to an Android phone a few years ago, when she needed a new phone (I needed a new test device, budget was tight) – she hated it.

I had to buy my wife a new iPhone when she threatened to throw the Android phone out the window of the car. It kept stalling her, tripping her up with sudden eruptions of complexity, which she needed me to fix – something she never had to fear when using an iPhone.

Granted her phone ran Gingerbread, and new versions of Android are far better.

Android is good, many people use it and love it. Android Apps can do things iPhone Apps are forbidden from doing. An Android app can send email or SMS on your behalf (once you grant fairly scary permissions before installation), which opens a vast range of desirable functionality, such as apps which create personalised SMS messages.

Android apps can run background processes (iPhone is very limited in this regard, though less so with iOS 7), and Android apps have far fewer limitations when it comes to app store approval – so it is possible to configure Android apps and Android phones to do really useful tasks, which simply cannot be done on an iPhone, unless you jailbreak it.

But iPhone has one, towering advantage of Android – it doesn’t scare people. It doesn’t deter people who are uncomfortable with geek devices.

This in my opinion is the source of iPhone’s loyalty – people who don’t like tech, feel comfortable using an iPhone. This simple, powerful advantage is what makes iPhone special.

It remains to be seen whether Apple iPhone can maintain this advantage. Android is catching up – each generation of the Android operating system is a little easier to use, a little less threatening to people who can’t stand geek tech.

The next version of Android may be the breakthrough which levels the playing field.