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Do you know what makes popular games a big money tree for their creators and that popular social networking games can be dangerous to your career?

 

• We spend most of our time on games, social networking, entertainment, utility and productivity (in descending order of importance) on our mobile phone.
• Do you know what makes these popular games a big money tree for their creators and that popular social networking games can be dangerous to your career?
• Read on and we will disclose them to you and suggest solutions that will give you the best of both worlds.

Time of Our Mobile Phones Life

Mobile phones are everywhere. Have you ever stopped to consider how you are spending your time on your mobile phone?

Source: VentureBeat

Mobile app analytics firm Flurry had conducted a survey and found that Americans spent 80 per cent of our time on mobile apps and 20 per cent on mobile browsers. Yes, mobile apps are the dominant force reason of why Americans use their phone and they spend 158 minutes every day on their phone.

Let us reorganise the data above to provide a better picture of the top 5 category of mobile apps and how much time is spent daily there.

Number	Category of mobile apps	Daily time spent (minutes)
1	Games	50.56
2	Social networking	37.92
3	Entertainment	12.64
4	Utility	12.64
5	Productivity	3.16

While this survey was done on Americans and we are Asians, these five categories are intuitively true. If you open your mobile phone right now, I would bet with you that you would have at least one mobile app of each category residing there.

Since we are spending significant amount of time on these mobile apps, let us find out about their appeal and see if we can do better. Due to the constraint of this article, I would only identify one incumbent and one new worthy challenger for each category. For example, in the social networking space, Facebook is the incumbent while Snapchat is the challenger.

You might have the incumbent mobile app on your phone and we are suggesting that you consider the challenger app. You might find that you are the early adopter to the next Instagram.

Games — Clash of Clans Vs Clash Royale

There are two types of gamers, the serious ones and the causal ones. The serious gamer would plan his life around games while the causal gamer would slip in time to play games. Mobile apps are designed mostly for the causal gamers in mind, where they can pull out their phones while commuting on buses and trains.

The age of Candy Crush and Angry Birds have passed to be supplanted by Clash of Clans. You can be the village chief for the grand sum of US$0.00 just by downloading this mobile game from the Play Store or iTunes. This game allows you to build you global empire from just one village and simple resources.

Current Favourite — Clash of Clans

Source: Digital Tutors

While this is a free game to download, it is highly addictive and skilled in enticing you to make mobile payments. This is the number one grossing mobile game app in Singapore, according to AppAnnie, and not surprising, this is also the number 1 mobile game worldwide, too. 

Source: SuperDataResearch

Clash of Clans made Supercell US$1.35 billion last year alone. This is a strategy game that does not consume too much of your time. You can open it to play for a few minutes while you ride on a train. You don’t have to complete every level and the game would wait for you to resume playing. If you want to speed things up, there is the option of buying 500 pile of gems for just US$4.99 and this is where Supercell made serious money.

New Favourite: Clash Royale

Source: Gottabemobile

It would appear that the only real challenger to Supercell is Supercell itself. Clash Royale is the improved version of Clash of Clan with a twist. You would still battle your enemies but you don’t have an unlimited army to bring along with you. It is a strategy game combined with the hobby of cards collection. You can bring eight of your best cards for each battle. 

Creating your own game will cost you between US$150,000 to US$450,000 to cover the cost of the planning, design, features, infrastructure, app administration, testing and deployment stages. If you want to get on the bandwagon today and it is too much for you upfront, you can always get a business loan for it.

Social Networking — Facebook Vs Snapchat

There is a need for us to be connected with each other in our busy lives. Social networking apps are where important announcements are made such as graduating, getting married, having your first child and occasionally where you disseminate the sad news of death. You laugh and cry with your social networking apps and this is their primary appeal.

Source: wersm

Here are the top 10 reasons why we spend so much time on social networking websites. Did any one of them resonate with you?

Facebook is clearly the incumbent when it comes to social networking. It started out as a causal social platform but it turned serious when governments and businesses started to list themselves there. While Facebook is the king of social networking, it is continuously improving itself in the competitive social networking space. One of the popular features on Facebook is its like button. It has since expanded it to six new expressive emojis after extensive testing with users.

Popular and Dangerous — Facebook

Source: Dawn (6 Facebook Reactions)

With the new Facebook Reactions, you can express yourself better than the simple like. According to Wired magazine, this six simple expressions was the result of serious social experiment by looking at numerous Facebook posts. Also, each emotion had to leave no room for confusion across different countries and culture.

Did you know that you can be sued for defamation over Facebook comments? If you post an angry remark directed at an important person, even if you are not sued, you would get into serious trouble with him later. While most of us won’t be so foolish to make a defamatory remark, we are also being judged on how we present ourselves on social media. 

Source: Jobvite

Social recruitment firm Jobvite did a survey and found out that an overwhelming 92 per cent of recruiters use social networking sites such as vetting their candidates. Imagine if there were two similar candidates vying for a single teaching vacancy. One is a Facebook angel who spends her weekend caring for the disadvantaged children. The other candidate prefers to go drinking with her friends. Both of them post their photos regularly on Facebook. Who do you think is more likely to get the job?

What if I were to tell you that you can have your cake and eat it too? In other words, what if you can stay connected with your friends with images and say whatever you want to say without fear of retribution?

Popular and Safe (Somewhat) — Snapchat

Snapchat is a social mobile app that allows you to take photos and share it with your friends and you can choose whether they can view your snaps up to two times for one to 10 seconds. After that, Snapchat will automatically delete these snaps forever so you don’t have to worry that it will affect your chances of landing a job. If no one viewed it within 24 hours of posting, it would be automatically deleted. 

Source: Android Community

If you want your friends to view it more than twice, you can choose to post your pictures or videos as a story. They can view it for as many times as they want, but it would be deleted automatically after 24 hours. However, the maximum length of the video is 10 seconds.

Picaboo was Snapchat’s original name and co-founded by Stanford University students Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy in April 2011. By July 2011, it had its first iOS version. Picaboo was rebranded in 2012 and expanded to Android. Snapchat had 10 million users and 20 million pictures were created daily as of October 2012. Facebook was concerned enough to launch Poke to challenge Snapchat in December 2012.

Source: TechCrunch

Poke failed to gain traction. Hence Facebook offered US$3 billion for Snapchat and was rebuffed. Snapchat is worth US$16 billion today and ranked number 6 of Fortune Unicorn list.

The appeal of Snapchat is simple. It is well designed and all your videos and images are temporary where you can share it with your friends. Unlike Facebook, there are less social judgment where you don’t have to be bothered by the likes or lack of it. For at least 10 seconds, you express yourself with fear. That said, you have to be aware that there is software out there to capture your videos, so you are not totally free. However, unless you post a viral video, it is not going to be as easy for recruiters to mine as your Facebook post.

Conclusion

We only have time for the top 2 categories of mobile apps for today. All these awesome apps are created by mobile app developers who had hatched a Minimum Awesome Product for them to listed here. This can take years and heavy resources in terms of labour and money but it is worth it.

The other conservative approach is to come up with a Minimum Variable Product to test the market. It is created just to test the core functions of the product to see if they can get traction. Both method would work and here is a toast to your next Clash of Clans.

The post Appeals and dangers of mobile games and social networking apps appeared first on e27.

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