Despite the avalanche of mobile apps that let people access local information, the mobile browser is still the king when it comes to finding out what’s going on in your city or neighborhood. People across the board are using their mobile phones to look up local info. ComScore reported today that the number of people in the U.S. who sought local content on mobile devices grew 51 percent from March 2008 to March 2009. The report also shows that the mobile browser is the most popular way consumers find local information, with 20.7 million browser users in March 2009, up 34 percent versus a year ago. Only about half as many people (11.3 million) use downloaded apps to find local data.
But downloaded apps did exhibit the strongest growth, up 83 percent versus a year ago. I’m sure the growth of the iPhone had something to do with that. What’s interesting is that despite the popularity of local content apps like those from Yelp and CitySearch, apps still remain the least popular method for mobile access of local information, with 11.3 million users in March. ComScore says that slightly more consumers use SMS for obtaining local information (11.7 million users) than apps, but the browser is still by far the most popular way for consumers to find info on local restaurants, bars, businesses and more.
Drilling down into the local content categories, the number of people accessing online directories has seen the greatest increase during the past year (73 %), followed by restaurants (70 %), maps (63 %) and movies (60%).
(Photo credit: Flickr/kballard).
First!
We will be on car/bike.. And we want to see where a shop is located. Mobile comes handy.
The report is hardly a surprise at all because people increasingly narrow their concern to matters in their neighborhood and with what is going on around them instead of what is going in other states or countries.
Outside.in has a great iPhone app too for hyper local news (like down to 200 yards or something!) I love the yelp local feed too, so much fun. Sorry people are missing out on this kind of stuff!
What do you do when you can’t find that information? You ask around, right? http://m.askaround.me does just that. And, if you have an android or an iphone with the new (3.0 GM) OS, it will even use your phone’s GPS.
“What’s interesting is that despite the popularity of local content apps like those from Yelp and CitySearch, apps still remain the least popular method for mobile access of local information”
Weird statement.
1. Please look at the trend, the % change from last year. Would the ratios still look the same when your project it two years into the future?
2. The only reason browser is still king is because the apps are just ramping up with relevant and to-the-point content. In the absence of those, people fall back to a google search as a fallback.
3. There are other important things that are not possible with the browser. Notifications/alerts for instance. Which is what iPhone OS 3.0 and others are bringing right now. Local alerts will be quite important.
I’ll stop now.
Personally,
I’d like to have a single device that is about the size of a kindle and is a combination of;
netbook
iPhone
Kindle
video conference platform
gps
TV / DVD
iPod
Works indoors and in bright sunlight
Waterproof in salt water to 100ft
esspresso machine.
That’s all.
“The report also shows that the mobile browser is the most popular way consumers find local information”
You mean while using a phone, right?
But browsing map over mobile would be still difficult, I guess.
The research is based on US data, and that’s fine, but our international (anecdotal) experience is slightly different.
Mobile browsing is ok if you can always get a reliable signal. When we were doing extensive usability research on our restaurant / bars site for Monaco (hanging around in bars deciding on the next watering hole), the lack of signal in many old buildings with 2 feet thick stone walls killed the experience. I’m now building a native iPhone app that syncs with the main site.
The other specific issue here is that tourists are *always* roaming (Monaco is 2nd smallest country in world) so data roaming charges can be very high. Better to load up at home and minimize data access during the visit rather than getting ripped off by your mobile carrier.