This is how Chatbots will Kill 99% of Apps

Chatbots and the Power of the Longtail

The average person uses 3–5 apps per day and the big app purge is coming… You know the day, you delete all of those apps that you don’t use.

In a really big way, apps have failed us and the reason is quite obvious: attention.

Simply put, we humans do not have enough bandwidth to consume all of the great content available to us. We can not read all of the great books, watch all of the best movies, listen to every amazing song and utilize every piece of technology. To do so would be humanly impossible!

Apps have made this process even harder by putting multiple friction points in front of us: Finding the Right App, Signing Up & Signing In, Learning a New UI, Remembering the App.

As a result, only a handful of apps have risen to the top and occupy valuable mind estate and these are the apps we use everyday. The other 99.99% of apps are sitting on the sideline, their tech goes unused.

Through Simplicity Bots can Solve this Problem

Power of Simplicity

Bots user experience is ultra fast and simple. In fact it is so simple, that it might be comparable to picking fruit from a tree -something humans have been doing for 100K years+. No matter what fruit you are picking, the user experience is similar while the reward is different.

The Immediate Value of a Bot

One of the main advantages with bots is that they offer instant access to value while eliminating friction. There is no sign in or sign up process, like an app or a website, and since the bot already has access to you social profile it can personalize information to you instantly.

Usability

Additionally, bots UI is standard so there will be no new UI to learn. First time users can get immediate value and solve their problems more quickly.

One Time Use Cases

Bots will excel at one time use cases. If you need help fighting a parking ticket, ordering pizza, or finding out if Sephora has the latest lipstick in stock, bots will effortlessly solve your problem.

Bots will dominate in these areas:

1. Retail: Imagine being able to quickly find out that Sephora just got your favorite lipstick in stock and then being able to put it on hold. Bot’s will offer this level of personalized experience without the heaviness of an app.
2. Customer Service: Everyone hates calling 1–800 numbers and soon bots will become a much-demanded alternative. Imagine never having to be on hold again!
3. Local Services: Bots will be great at getting local services. If you need to per-order lunch, book a reservations or even hire a local service pro like Joe the Plumber, chatbots will automate this process.
4. Scalable Personalized Content: Bots can segment their audience and give different users different experiences. This is something you can now do Chatfuel and is showing signs of great success.
5. Inherently Social: Soon you and your friends will be able to summon a bot to group chat and order movie tickets, book a trip, or even order take out.
6. One Time Use Cases: In areas where the epistemology is well known a bot will be able to offer professional grade services. For example, a dermatology bots will be able to diagnose your skin ailments and prescribe medicine. Bots will be able to quickly scan your eye and tell you if you have diabetes (something Google has done successfully) or even fight a parking ticket for you.
7. Conversational: When multiple variable inputs are needed, bots excel. This means that bot apps can more effectively understand a particular need than an app. Furthermore, conversations are very human which means that a bot has a much higher chance of being memorable.

This is where Bots kill 99% of Apps.

“Only 1,000 of the one million apps in the iOS App Store or Android’s Google Play Store have 50,000 or more users. That’s only one-tenth of 1% of all apps. And Although many people have lots of apps on their smartphones, Quantcast reports that as many as 50% of people who download an app only use it once!” Jillian D’Onfro | Business Insider.

Due to high friction and low discoverability, 99% of apps and their technology will never see the light of day. This is a massive waste!

Scaling the Long tail

Bots tail will have far more value than Apps’ long tail. In terms of popularity, the tail will both be much longer and have a higher volume. Bots will be more comparable to websites or even phone calls than apps.

The internet allowed us to democratize content and product creation. As a result, artists, bloggers, musicians, product creators are no longer at the whims of large corporations. Solo acts have access to distribution channels like never before and Bots offer a logical next step.This means further democratization for product and content creation and an even bigger push towards personalization.

Conclusion

In order for bots to fully capitalize on this opportunity, discovery will need to be improved. Currently, Facebook does not even have a bot store; however this is sure to change.

One of Facebook’s main goals is to ensure that their bot store doesn’t fall victim to the same issues of the App Stores, and in terms of discovery, it is more like a Google Search and less like Yahoo circa 1996.