A glut of companies have recently unbundled their mobile apps. Google, Facebook, Foursquare, and the The New York Times have all started splitting their apps apart like a reverse Voltron, each addressing a specific task. Each company has unique motivations driving its decision to unbundle: Microsoft’s release of Office apps for iPad may have had some influence on Google’s move, and Foursquare says studying customer behavior lead them to split off their social features. But there are some common threads in the trend.
Single, monolithic apps don’t lend themselves well to rapid iteration in competitive markets. Small, task-focused apps, however, can be developed quickly—and maintained under shorter release cycles. Small apps also have the advantage of targeting customer cohorts, and delivering on the specific jobs to be done without the bloat of extraneous features. But the benefits can come at a cost.
Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of unbundling.
What’s in the box?
Customers who use unbundled app suites may find jumping between apps tedious. It adds extra seconds to a workflow, which isn’t appreciated in the short sessions so common to mobile devices. Lots of small apps clutter up your home screen, making it harder to find what you’re looking for. Sure, you can put them all in folders—but that adds yet another tap and makes icons harder to recognize at such a small scale.
Keep it simple, stay nimble
While MailChimp hasn’t split our mobile apps apart, we have developed them in parallel, thinking of them as a connected suite. It’s been tempting to add lots of features to MailChimp Mobile, our most popular app, now with more than a half million downloads. We briefly considered …read more
Source: Mail Chimp
