How Mobile App Developers are gearing up for 5G

Quotes

• “5G is the next generation of wireless technology. It’s a standard that carriers and OEMs, device manufacturers are basically rallied around and are now producing towers, networks, and devices that are interoperable with each other.”  - Matt“5G does a lot of great things. First off the number of connections is incredibly high. About 2,000 per connections is what has enabled for 4G. In 5G it actually gets to over a million connections and it is about 10X the speed of 4G. The amount of power that is used and required to run 5G connected devices is a lot lower than others before.” - Matt“So first off, the cellphone towers are going to be able to connect to more devices. I’m assuming that’s important because you’re getting everything from your connected home devices and people are carrying multiple devices at this point.” - Ben “LTE did add some speed but it wasn’t really transformative. I remember when smartphones started to come on the scene even in some powerful ways, people are saying that there’s no way we will sit around and watch a TV show on our phone vs. sitting in a living room. Compared to where we are today, people are watching more TV in bed than they are sitting on the couch.” - Matt“The one that everybody talks about is AV, AR and all these things that are basically augmenting screens and capabilities, being able to do real-time processing of data and services like this is going to create environments where marketers can take advantage of.” - Matt“Have you ever heard of Reface app yet? It can actually superimpose you on videos that are popular today.” - Matt“It’s like deep fake technology.” - Ben “Yes. This app is so good where you could do this in real-time. So if you could process this as I am talking to you, we’re gonna have really interesting things that go on and these are going to create environments where I think marketers and advertisers are just gonna be able to take advantage of.” - Matt“The location capabilities and the granularity of location is actually going to be a hell of a lot higher resolution in 5G. What it will allow folks to do is not just know if you’re in Tubergen house or the Shapiro house, it’s are you in your bathroom or bedroom knowledge. Now that could potentially enable opportunities for marketers to present more valuable messaging at a certain point in time to users, depending on the context in a situation they’re in even within their own home.” - Matt “I’m a marketer and I will use data to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time to drive business results like that’s the name of the game and it’s not something that we invented. But I don’t want somebody specifically targeting me when I’m in the bathroom knowing that I’m indisposed, let’s say. That seems a little terrifying.” - Ben“As a privacy guy myself, I also have concerns. I think both Apple and Google are doing a really good job of expressly securing permission from users for certain types of activity. I think the operating systems themselves are doing a much better job than they have in the past and they are spending tons of money to make sure the privacy is protected where they want it to be.” - Matt  “That being said, as a user there might be a scenario where you’re willing to expose that fine location and there might be good reasons to be able to expose that and that could also present opportunities for marketers.” - Matt“It’s a big question for society too. It’s a brave new world when smartphones came on the scene and look how much we’ve changed since then. We should all be vigilant as 5G comes to market and understand the limitations and liabilities that it could pose.” - Matt“Just like when 3G and 4G came, there are things that came about that we didn’t necessarily plan for. There are some things that a marketer should be looking at. One, in particular, is how applications and app developers are getting their applications on phones and how they’re using it.” - Matt“Google has developed something with app bundles where you get essentially certain content that gets installed over a period of time with the use of an application and this idea of an application having downloaded on a device and then deleting that application will soon go away in the sense of transfer speeds and virtualization of applications will enable an inner seamless experience.” - Matt“I imagine that for OEMs it will have a big impact because the amount of storage that you need on your phone will be impacted. That’s a big suck on your phone as it needs to maintain all the software all at once and a lot of you’re not using.” - Ben “I think of it very much as we’re going more towards apps being like websites where when I want it, I go there and I use it as opposed to I have it as a downloaded file or asset on my phone. It’s more like a cloud storage methodology than being a hard file being saved on your device.” - Ben “A lot of marketers, I think, don’t see the impact of file size as it pertains to their funnel as they think about advertising. For example, advertising a 5GB game to download, right now if you’re willing to just spend a lot of money, your conversion rate is really, really tough and it’s quite a bit lower than say an application that maybe 50 megabytes in the sense that a user has to go and download as hop-on wifi, has to get on high-level connectivity.” - Matt“Even now with LTE getting an immediate download is a hard thing to do for a large file. In the world of 5G, file size may not matter at all. We’ve actually dealt with many partners where they went from a gigabyte file to a 50 megabyte file and their conversion rates, the click to install will gain 5X just because the level of friction to get that application on a device is so high. So friction matters a lot.” - Matt“It’s becoming an increasingly impatient world and it’s funny how, yeah that actual 30 seconds or maybe two minutes to download an app is the difference between your ROI being positive and negative because people just don’t want to wait extra 90 seconds for your app to be installed. They’ve already moved on.” - Ben “The takeaway for me is that 5G is going to make the access to data faster and we’ll get a bit more of granularity in terms of location, which for me, raises some privacy concerns for us as marketers as it potentially raises some opportunities as well. It is an evolution that we’re going to continue to see as we keep seeing faster speeds, more connectivity and in different places. We’re going to have interesting technologies that are going to rise and create marketing opportunties as well.” - Ben