Last year, Nielsen estimated the average mobile user has 41 apps on his or her smartphone. In April, a Flurry study showed the average smartphone user opens only eight apps a day, with the most popular being Facebook, YouTube and game apps. And according to a 2012 report from Localytics, 22 percent of all apps are only opened once.
Though these numbers are for mobile in general, not just
tablets, the picture is clear: There’s not much room for magazine apps.
Magazines need extremely dedicated readers to avoid being buried.
Invisible in the stream of information
To make things worse, magazine apps themselves are invisible in the large streams of information governing the web.
When a magazine is organized as an app rather than as a
website, its articles can neither be indexed or searched on the web. And
even if they could, clicking the link in Google at best takes readers
to an app store, not to the article itself — cutting the magazine out of
the greatest traffic driver in today’s world.
The pattern is the same on social media. When you can’t
link directly to an article, the urge to tweet or tell your friends
about it drastically shrinks. And curators like Flipboard and Zite can’t
look into, link or grab content from within magazine apps.
Antiquated monoliths
When I nevertheless manage to find the time to open up an
iPad magazine, I feel as if I’m holding an outdated media product in my
hands. That’s ironic because these apps tend to be visually appealing,
with interactive graphics, embedded videos and well-crafted navigation
tools. But the gorgeous layout that works so well in print gets
monolithic, almost scary, in its perfectionism on the iPad, and I find
myself longing for the web. It’s messy but far more open, more
accessible and more adaptable to me, my devices and needs.
Most magazine apps also fail in social.http://gigaom.com/2013/10/06/tablet-magazines-failure/
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