If you read any of the popular tech sites with any regularity they are all screaming “mobile, mobile, mobile” in fact we are also always reporting that mobile is exploding. Because it is. It’s no mistake the opportunity for developers in mobile is there, it’s the hottest space in tech right now.
Revenue supports the fact that you should be developing for tablets. Last week we reported that tablet and smartphone revenue was bigger than the entire consumer electronics market. This data was backed by hard sales figures so at first look there is huge opportunity in the tablet space as well.
Last month MixPanel dove into those mobile numbers though and found that while people are buying tablets they aren’t using them nearly as much as smartphones. The mobile usage numbers often clump both smartphones and tablets together but when you extract the tablet use from the entire number you find that it’s only 25% of the total “mobile devices”
MixPanel says that the smartphoen is a Swiss Army Knife and that it’s dominating in terms of mobile usage but they also say that the opportunity with tablets is too large to be ignored.
More importantly there are several sectors that definitely need to develop for tablets. While people are using their smartphones for everything under the sun people turn to tablets for gaming, social, education and e-commerce. All four of those categories MixPanel reports are must builds for developers to build for tablets. Media, health, travel, enterprise, and music apps and companies should definitely consider building for tablets.
Despite the fact that the Google Play store sees 25% more downloads than the iTunes app store, MixPanel reports that iOS tablets see more than twice as much use as Android tablets. On Android tablets gaming is more than double of that on iOS tablets while other categories are inline with iOS. MixPanel says “unless you are in the games business, it’s probably not yet time to invest in building an Android app for tablet.”
Source: MixPanel
