My Mobile Day

The cellphone has become an extension of the human experience. It is often the first thing we see when waking up to start the day, as well as the last thing to verify before going to sleep. While the argument remains that a dependency on these pocket supercomputers is bad, mobiles remain virtually essential in our increasingly technological world. In my phone, I have whopping 70 apps downloaded on my cellphone! Until I just recently counted them out, I didn’t realize the how big of a number that seems to be. I guess grouping and sorting them by genre in neat little boxes helps me forget that!

Of those 70 apps, I can see which 5 apps are the ones I use the most via the “screen time” feature on my phone. My fifth most used app is Messenger, the companion app developed by Facebook for ease with messaging. With a lot of group work being done in my studies recently, this makes a lot of sense and had proved very productive as it is available for use on any device. My fourth most used app is Instagram. While I very rarely post myself, I enjoy keeping up to date with my favorite photographer's work, art, famous musicians, and occasionally the antics of my close friends. My third most used app is Safari, the internet browser. This has such a heavy usage on my phone because I use it to browse Reddit, the macro blog information site. Ironically, this is because I refuse to download the official Reddit mobile app itself and the alternatives are based on freemium user models! The second most used app on my phone is Twitter. I love twitter, and rely on it heavily for news consumption, current events and sports new and highlights. It is also where I find the best memes, videos and hilarious conversations! 

And now for the reveal of the app I use the most! It’s Facebook! While popular belief should dictate that millennial are largely finished with the platform due to the heavy use from older generations, I am one of those who uses it daily! Again, I very rarely post myself and certainly bygone are the days of quirky status updates, but Facebook has morphed into something of an multi tool. Now offering things like groups based on interest and a buy and sell marketplace, there is a lot of time you can spend on the app. I, however, spend much of my time getting trapped into what I call a video vortex. The FB video player has tons of small entertaining videos of user generated content, clips from films and TV shows, and sports and new highlights. It’s easy to get lost in an infinite video scroll as with one quick swipe you are on to the next one, even more instantaneous than something like YouTube where a few clicks are required. Quite honestly, I know the amount of time I spend doing this is a little unhealthy, but reflecting on it is the first step towards spending some of this time on a more productive app, perhaps something to do with language learning? 

With all my aforementioned cell phone usage, there are lots of opportunities for marketers to take advantage of me and the micro moments that I conjure up every time I swipe my screen. Let's focus on the top two apps I use, Facebook and Twitter. Because of their unique infrastructure, they have both my personal demographic information, and can track my interests based on the content of the posts that I view and interact with. In one instance, I was wondering what to order for dinner. As I scrolled through twitter, I got an ad for SkipTheDishes. Now I normally use UberEats to order food, but as this new service was offering a discount for first time users, I decided to give it a try. It felt very timely, and the outcome was that I got a nice percentage off the delicious Shawarma that I ordered! Another micro moment I had was when searching for a retro video game on the Facebook marketplace. I could not find a good condition copy of the game as was looking for, but promptly received an ad for a store outside of the GTA that specialized in retro games and restoration. It felt like a perfect solution to my problem and I was able to follow through to their site and order the game to be shipped straight to my house! 

Regarding mobile friction, I often find myself in a small tangle browsing Reddit on my phone browser. When you open a new Reddit window, you always receive a large prompt that urges you to download the official Reddit app. It is annoying because it happens often and turns me off giving it a chance. That and the fact that it is well documented that the official app is slower and crashes often. Based on all my reactions, it seems like people want to be served subtle simplicity. In this day and age, it seems user behavior is much more predictable due to the mass amounts of data available. Over everything I think it is important to be as organic feeling as possible when advertising adjacent products to people. Remember, it should be service with a smile!