Why Mobile First Matters

Mobile First is one of those expressions that didn’t exist until very recently. While it’s meaning may seem clear, not everyone fully understands the implications. It’s widespread knowledge that in the last year the use of mobile devices to access the internet or engage with a businesses, completely surpassed desktop use.

As a budding entrepreneur, it’s important that you understand what mobile first means, not just as a buzz phrase but as a movement, and what it means for your search for business opportunities.

From a development perspective, mobile first means something fairly simple; optimising online sites and apps, be they web based or mobile, for use on mobile devices, or creating exclusively for mobile with no consideration of other platforms. More and more businesses will have a website that is optimised for mobile, or have a whole new mobile site constructed to cater to mobile users.  Projects like Google AMP have made it easier for developers to optimise these sites by the addition of simple codes. This has allowed sites which had otherwise been slow to create a mobile presence to quickly and easily find their place on the market.

Web based social media sites like Facebook, YouTube and other social media saw explosive success when they launched mobile apps that had the same or sometimes more functionality than their original web presence, such as live video sharing.

Of course the most famous examples of mobile first development are the mobile exclusive apps which dominate most of our lives. Snapchat is one of the most popular apps today and exists exclusively on mobile. Instagram created a web based interface for users to create detailed profiles, often used by online marketers as a secondary storefront, but taking, editing and sharing photos remains exclusive to the mobile app and most people interact with Instagram primarily through their smartphone.

For users, mobile first is both the reason for and the result of all that development. Mobile first can be used to describe moments when a person might reach for their phone to answer a trivia question in a pub quiz, or clarify a fact in a debate over the news, instead of just waiting until they get home and checking on their computer, or even using one that may be in their immediate vicinity. But more accurately, it describes the growing numbers of people who have their first and then most of their primary interactions with the internet through their mobile device.

This is for a range of reasons but usually down to cost and ease of use; Smartphones can be bought on contract, sometimes with no up front costs, just the monthly bill to pay. For every paid app you need to download there is a free version that functions just as well. Personal computing in it’s current state does not allow for such flexibility and there are less options to source free versions of your preferred software.

In South East Asia or and across Africa, a much broader range of mobile networks and smartphone brands are available to consumers than those that dominate in the West. This makes them much more affordable and accessible to the average consumer than personal computers and a result, they outstrip computers in sales and popularity. In Indonesia alone there is a population of 255.5 million people, but the country has over 305 million mobile connections. While it is more common for UK or US based consumers to have a laptop as well as a smartphone, we are still moving away from our desktops in vast numbers and increasingly, especially in younger demographics, mobiles are their primary or indeed only means of getting online.

Mobile is often called the future, but that’s wrong. Mobile is the now.  As we have described above, both developers and consumers are finally taking advantage of the mobile market. Development is guiding consumers, consumers are pushing development and the cycle is continuous and ever expanding.

As a budding entrepreneur, searching for a business opportunity that could place you right at the forefront of consumer thinking, a mobile based business opportunity is the only way to go.

To learn more about mobile first markets and explore your next business opportunity, speak to Eazi-Apps today.