8 Reasons Why We’ll Launch A Chatbot Rather Than A Mobile App

With the launch of Locowise 3.0 we were discussing the best way to release the new product to a mobile audience.

The initial idea was to hire a dedicated team to build iOS and Android phone apps, but the upcoming chatbot revolution is slowly changing our minds.

These are the eight reasons why we’re considering not to go for a conventional mobile app, but plan to launch a messenger chatbot instead:

People are hooked on messengers. Messenger apps are an alternative to home screens on the phones of millions of people. The big four messengers have overtaken the big four social networks in the number of active users.

900 million people use Facebook Messenger every month. There are Line and WeChat in the Asian market. There are also Telegram, Slack, and Kik. We can expect Whatsapp to get bots in the future too. Possibly Snapchat too.

There’s an engagement problem with mobile apps. The app boom is over with downloads declining by more than 20% year on year. 65% of all mobile users download no new apps in a typical month. Facebook-owned apps (Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Whatsapp) account for more than 60% of all app downloads.

Studies have shown that people use between three and five apps for up to 85% of the total time they spend on a phone. Half of their time is spent on the favorite app, and 30% more is spent on app number two and three combined. People only use 12 apps on average daily.

Is your app going to make it competing against Facebook, Chrome, Facebook Messenger, YouTube, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Instagram and all the big ones?

Here’s an interesting slide from Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report for 2016.

By launching a chatbot, we’re instantly available on all the mobile platforms and devices. Both on iOS and Android. There’s no need for us to get a dedicated development resources that are specialised for these platforms. No need to spend weeks and months developing an app. No need to wait for approval to get into the app stores.

Even if you’re successful in getting someone to install your app, 23% of all users abandon an app after one use. 62% of all users will use the app less than 11 times. Many delete the apps so sending app notifications doesn’t work.

Brands put in a lot of effort and spend a lot of money trying to get users to come back to their apps. Facebook and messenger apps, in general, don’t have that problem. Users average 50 minutes per day between Facebook, Facebook Messenger and Instagram.

The big question is how people will react to chatting with brands rather than their friends.

There’s an increasing trend towards conversational user interfaces.

Chat based interface seems to be winning in terms of engagement. On Facebook Messenger, a billion messages are exchanged between users and businesses per month already.

There are some interesting examples of successful standalone chat apps too.

There’s the Quartz app, and there’s the new Marsbot app from Foursquare.

Conversational interface is faster, simpler and more user-friendly.

Here’s Mary Meeker again:

People open messenger notifications much more than emails, social media posts and other types of notifications as they are used to getting messages from their friends. We all recognize the trend of lower open rates on emails, the decreasing reach and low engagement on social media platforms.

Chatbots broadcast messages at scale, but they’re still intimate one on one conversations. It’s very early for us to get any data from the existing chatbots, but one early example is the CNN bot that gets people to engage for over 2 minutes per session.

There are many tools that can help you build bots quickly and without the need of mobile development experience or resources. There’s a whole industry of new apps in the making. There’s Api.ai, Motion.ai, Chatfuel and so many more.

Most bots on the market right now are not very advanced, but great and useful apps might dominate our future. Take a look at China. WeChat is used by millions for everything from chatting with friends to shopping. Which brand will create the first major bot success on Facebook Messenger?

Having a chatbot is also a good introduction and a learning experience that brands can use for potential future development on Amazon’s Alexa, the new Google Home and other conversation-based devices and platforms in the future.

We don’t expect things to be easy in the bot world. These are the early days, and many things remain to be seen. The starting phase of anything can be erratic and it’s easy to overrate the trends.

How will people react to having brands and businesses in their Messengers? How will the new users discover our chatbot? How can a chatbot be made more useful and sticky? Will Facebook be restricting the access to users in order to monetize the Messenger?

Only time and experience on the platform will help us find out.