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Contactless payments may be all the rage these days, but you still have tap your smartphone, smartwatch or card on a terminal of some kind.And at busy times, this can mean standing in queues or hanging around for ages waiting for the restaurant bill to arrive.All that could be about to change.”Payments are vanishing inside apps,” explains Dave Birch, a payments expert at Consult Hyperion. “That’s where all the interesting stuff is going on.”Apple, Google and Samsung have all anticipated the significance of this and offer in-app payments via their own apps.
The services like Android Pay, Apple Pay and Samsung Pay all rely on the contactless payment infrastructure – embedded near-field communication (NFC) chips communicating transaction data with a payment terminal.
Yet NFC isn’t exactly new technology, and adoption rates for some of these services have not been stellar so far. Plus, US contactless infrastructure lags behind that of Europe.
Which is why alternative approaches – such as in-app payments – that do away with the need for point-of-sale hardware completely are causing such excitement.
Cash direct
This approach is also being adopted for easy person-to-person payments. “Everything [the user] can do within the banking app, he can do within the keyboard, our keyboard,” he says. The payee doesn’t need to have Paykey installed to receive the money – but he or she would need to be a member of the Paym database, which links UK bank accounts to mobile phone numbers. The Paym service currently has 3.2m users. Other person-to-person apps, like Venmo, are also hoping to corner the market for such transactions.

And when EU regulation comes into force in 2018 requiring banks to provide access to data for third party app developers, companies like Facebook or Twitter may well start incorporating payment functionality within their own apps.
“Once you can connect Facebook directly to your bank account, why would you go to your bank app?” asks Mr Birch. What price convenience? But there’s another issue at stake with mobile payment apps, besides convenience and functionality: security.”Mobile apps are miniature web apps, so there are many vulnerabilities associated with those,” says Tom Kellermann, chief executive of security investment fund Strategic Cyber Ventures. Around half of mobile payment apps have not had their code effectively audited for security flaws prior to release, he believes. Image captionDespite the rise of smartphones, about 85% of global transactions are still cash-based Users are also at risk of having banking credentials stolen after downloading malicious payment apps masquerading as official ones, he warns.
Mr Kellermann says his advice to users would include:

avoid using public wi-fi wherever possible install security software on your smartphone use strong passphrases on banking apps avoid leaving Bluetooth on when you’re not using it.Security issues aside, there can be no doubt that the smartphone is transforming the way we pay for things and send money to each other. But don’t write off cash and cards just yet, says Ann Cairns, president of international markets at MasterCard. She points out that around 85% of the world’s transactions are still in cash. “And that figure isn’t going down,” she says. There is also a great deal of costly infrastructure in place to handle card payments, so retailers will be reluctant to jettison all that immediately. But as ever cheaper smartphones come onto the market, mobile payments are only set to grow.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35933801

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Today has shared the monthly report on both smartphone and app marketshare. The data released today reflects the three-month average ending in December of 2015. The report breaks down the top smartphone platforms, manufacturers, and perhaps most interestingly, the most popular apps…

Facebook remains the most used app on smartphones, reaching 76.8% of all smartphone users that are 18 or older. Facebook Messenger comes in second place with 62.5%, while apps from Google round out the top 7.

Apple Music, which accounts for anyone that uses the Music app on iOS, even if they don’t use the streaming aspect, achieved 32.2% reach during this time. Apple Maps came in slightly lower at 29.1%, compared to the 50.9% of Google Maps. The extra reach of Google Maps, however, is likely due to the fact that the app is available on both iOS and Android.

One interesting thing to note, however, is that these reach percentages only account for smartphone users 18 years or older. This restriction likely skews data somewhat. For instance, Snapchat does not make the list of the top 15 most used apps, despite it being one of the most popular and fastest growing apps among teenagers. Likewise, Twitter comes in 15th place in this ranking, but would likely place higher if the data accounted for users under the age 18.

Apple still holds the title as the top smartphone manufacturer this time around, although it did slip slightly. The report shows that Apple holds 42.9% of the market, a 0.7% change compared to the previous month’s report.

On the Android side, Samsung, LG and Motorola all saw minor increases of 0.8%, 0.5%, and 0.5%, respectively. It’s worth noting that the data released from  last month also saw Apple decline by 1%, making it back-to-back months of decline for the company. Nevertheless, it still leads overall.

In terms of the top smartphone platforms, Android still holds the lead with 53.3% of the market, an increase of 1%. Apple’s iOS accounts for 42.9%. Again, that’s a 0.7% decrease compared to last month.

With arguments of “peak iPhone” floating around, these numbers are somewhat interesting, but in the long run, minor marketshare fluctuations are nothing to worry too much about.

http://9to5mac.com/2016/02/04/most-popular-smartphone-apps/

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Apple device owners spent more than $20 billion in the App Store in 2015. Apple users broke App Store records by spending more than $1.1 billion on apps and in-app purchases this holiday season.

That figure includes money spent during the two week period ending on Jan. 3. New Year’s Day was the biggest day in App Store history, with more than $144 million spent in the 24-hour period.

Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president who now leads the App Store, said that Apple device users spent more than $20 billion in the App Store throughout all of 2015. That’s double the 2013 figure.

Apple is now busy expanding the App Store to new platforms, like the Apple TV. The early crop of Apple TV apps already provide some insight as to how apps behave differently on the TV versus the phone.

http://time.com/4169153/apple-app-store-stats-2015/

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With apps losing their novelty and e-commerce firms revisiting their mobile web strategies, Google has emerged as the winner retaining its dominance of online ad. Apps as e-commerce companies told anyone who cared to listen, were the future. Many put their money where their mouths were, altogether withdrawing from the mobile web.

Now, as apps lose their novelty, and as smartphone users uninstall apps to clear up memory, these companies are revisiting their mobile web strategies. Start-ups across the board, especially those that had moved unevenly towards the app, are scrambling to improve their mobile web offerings.

Earlier this year, companies had reduced resources and efforts towards mobile web, and the app-only strategy was taking centre-stage. But increasingly, we are seeing re-prioritization of mobile web and companies are giving equal attention to mobile web again.

Nobody is saying apps aren’t important. But it has become crucial for start-ups to have functional and well-designed mobile websites or web apps.

Few predicted this shift, which wasn’t even on the radar of many start-ups a few months ago. The mobile web never died, and for those who moved to app-only…it was a faulty decision in the first place. For service providers like us, it is never an either/or choice. Slowly you are seeing a lot of innovation happen on the web; for instance, there are app-like features now available on the web.

India is expected to have close to 400 million mobile Internet users by June 2016, according to a report released in November by the Internet and Mobile Association of India and market research firm IMRB International.

A majority of these users will access the Internet only through their smartphones. With the growing popularity of mobile apps, which many say offer a superior customer experience than conventional websi-tes, start-ups shifted their pro-duct and business strategies towards the app at the expense of desktop and mobile websites.

During the funding boom of 2014-15, many investors regarded the number of app downloads as one of the indicators of a start-up’s performance. Entrepreneurs and marketing heads rushed to maximize app downloads. Soon, however, it was evident that they didn’t necessarily result in high growth.

Consequently, the focus moved to usage and customer engagement. In this scenario, many start-ups and their investors have accepted that their expectations of an app-only world haven’t materialized. There are several reasons for this. Many first-time Internet users, especially in smaller cities and towns, prefer using their mobile web browsers to shop and surf the Internet rather than download a multitude of apps on their low-cost smartphones that have limited storage.

Customers also tend to get rid of most of the apps they download because of the inconvenience of frequent app updates and the limited storage space on phones, studies have shown. Now, many start-ups are moving to building mobile web apps, which can potentially offer the convenience and superior experience of so-called native apps, but without their limitations.

A few business-to-business (B2B) start-ups are also increasing their focus on the web.

As long as you can offer an app-like experience, mobile web is better for customers and companies. Customers don’t have to keep downloading updates and they save on space. For companies, it’s cheaper to build a mobile app compared to a native app. The shift back to mobile web will also affect advertising and marketing spending.

Mobile web continues to be a way for consumers to engage with content. When it comes to monetization, it will continue on both. Still, there are people who believe that apps will eventually call the shots.In the mobile Internet world, it is an app war. And in an app war, you can’t win by betting on a mobile website.

http://www.livemint.com/Companies/LQEj72VEodIgrCscvSB07O/Startups-refocus-on-mobile-web-as-apponly-strategy-loses-f.html

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It’s the marketing slogan that has become a maxim for daily life in the tech age: There’s an app for that.
Apps – short for application – are downloaded programs that have become a staple of smartphones and tablets, turning what were little more than novel gadgets into photo studios, portable offices, vast libraries and video game consoles.
And, despite a stereotype of technophobia, older adults are also starting to embrace them. A study released in April 2014 by survey group Nielson, said 51 percent of cellphone owners over age 55 have a smartphone. Another study released by the same firm in July 2014 said, on average, that age group was spending 21 hours a month across 22 apps.
Locally, more than a few residents have incorporated apps, from the whimsical to the practical, into their everyday lives.
Some people said one app that has been helpful from a productivity standpoint is Office Lens, a free app that is part of Microsoft’s suite of programs. The app allows someone to take a snapshot of posters, whiteboards or documents – even at an angle – and it will automatically straighten and crop them into usable images.
People used it several times at conferences and to snap a picture of programs from events he／she’s attended with his/her friends.

http://www.gvnews.com/news/apps-make-life-easier-and-more-fun/article_aeb88d12-5efe-11e5-9882-4b7ebbc08774.html

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