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Super-Apps, Hyper-Personalization And Traversing The Metaverse: 2022 Mobile Predictions

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Are super-apps poised to take over Europe and the United States? Will 2022 see millions of people immersed in the metaverse? How can hyper-personalization further improve the customer experience? These were just some of the questions I put to a group of industry leaders and experts when I asked them to predict the most exciting and significant mobile developments we have in store for us over the coming year.

According to App Annie’s Lexi Sydow, the average smartphone user experience will improve in 2022 thanks to major improvements in location-based technology and artificial intelligence capabilities. Personally, this is something I am most looking forward to because of the impact it will have in areas such as e-commerce and gaming.

Raj Shah, of digital consulting firm Publicis Sapient, gave me a brilliant insight into the fascinating future of the metaverse. Discussing the multitudinous uses of this tech, Raj said major hardware advances mean AR and VR experiences are going to be more widely available and could become a fixture in our workplaces as we seek out a 3D world to recreate our workspaces and office environments in our homes.

A boost to the app economy in the form of 5G-connected devices was a key prediction from General Mobile Turkey’s Ilkay Cihaner. In discussing how the past couple of years have seen an acceleration towards a digitized future, Ilkay pointed out that the high-speed data transmission afforded by 5G will be crucial in facilitating the immersive and 3D experiences that will eventually be available on a mass scale.

In short, this year looks set to be packed full of industry innovations and huge improvements to smartphone technology. But with opportunities come challenges and many of the experts I consulted agreed that companies will need to be agile and move quickly in responding to cutting-edge developments or risk losing large segments of the market.

Ilkay Cihaner, Chief Strategy & Business Development Officer, General Mobile, Turkey 

What is your take on the role of mobile device manufacturers and mobile carriers in the app economy in 2022? 

The integrated end-to-end mobile tech ecosystem has become more crucial with continuously developing mobile applications. Mobile device manufacturers and mobile carriers need to focus on the holistic approach to provide solutions for consumers. From the point of making life easier for consumers, mobile device tech ecosystems offer many areas as growth-driven with wearables and IoT to serve health, education, and smart home appliances.

Mobile devices get more powerful, especially with 5G connectivity developments which also raise the number of connected mobile devices. Mobile devices equipped with high-speed connectivity technologies will become more affordable and take place in entry-level smartphones, which will also boost the app economy in 2022. 

What will be the hot topics/emerging trends in mobile marketing next year? What are your app economy predictions? 

The past two years have helped us become more digital in every aspect of our lives, and this experience has accelerated the era of digitization with virtualism much earlier. Our social behaviors will change and adapt to a new simulated digital era called "Metaverse". The rapid increase of 3-D simulated virtual environments will also raise the usage area of non-fungible tokens "NFT", which is becoming more widespread and scalable for digital ownership. These environments and digital ownership will open many opportunities for mobile marketing in 2022. 

Considering all of these aspects, high-speed data transmission 5G technologies will become more crucial too. Therefore, we focus on products that combine 5G and Wi-Fi 6 solutions with Mesh technology to provide a stable connection for the future of 3-D virtual experiences.

Charles Manning, Founder and CEO, Kochava 

What will be the hot topics/emerging trends in mobile marketing next year? What are your app economy predictions? 

Adtech has entered a privacy-first, zero-party data era where user privacy and personalized experiences will be at the forefront of marketing. This theme has played a significant role in the monumental shake ups in 2021 in how digital advertising is done across targeting and measurement. This means that the tools and methodologies are undergoing  significant transition. Trends will continue to be shaped by a combination of cohort-based measurement and differential privacy and we will see new user acquisition models that are inspired by web3. 

Configurable cohort based reporting, incrementality measurement across channels and platforms, and ‘data clean rooms’ are going to be the primary topics for 2022 related to marketing. As for app economy predictions, web3 gaming apps, wearable app integration and native commerce across CTV/OTT/Mobile are key sectors to watch for in 2022.

Lexi Sydow, Head of Insights, App Annie

Super-apps are already a big component of the Asian apps market. Do you think they will catch on in the USA and Europe in the coming year as some tech forecasters have suggested?

There are definitely signs of super apps gaining more traction in the US and Europe. PayPal has announced its intention to become a super app, as well as Lydia in France. We’ve also seen many apps branching to other verticals as well, such as Netflix moving into games. The super app effect will likely be gradual as apps branch out into more services and begin bundling in natural ‘next steps.’ Major social players are beginning to do this, such as TikTok’s shoppable live streams, Pinterest shopping and Instagram shopping, and Amazon’s added live streaming features. Finance and shopping apps are branching out into other financial service offerings as well, such as PayPal incorporating cryptocurrency.

Location-based technology and AI have already had a huge impact in terms of personalizing the smartphone experience. Yet, consumer research shows people want an even more tailored experience. Do you see any developments in this area being made in 2022?

Location and AI are incredibly important when it comes to recommendations delivered to users. AI powers recommendations ranging from finance (recommendations on your spending habits, budget and saving, such as in Albert) to shopping (analyzing customer search queries to recommend better products that are more relevant, like Amazon), to social media algorithms around surfacing relevant content to users (TikTok, and its editing and translation features). Our mobiles are our most personal, trusted, and always-on devices, and mobile apps provide a unique opportunity to remove friction and increase personalization — exactly where location-based technology and AI can dramatically help improve the customer experience.

Given surging interest in fintech and financial literacy, mobile shopping, food and grocery delivery and rapid delivery services (like Getir) we can expect to see further development in the AI and location-based space in 2022. Location and AI are both apparent in dating apps which are essentially the de facto matchmaking tool worldwide and represent some of the highest-grossing apps on the app stores — an indication of the value consumers derive from these services. In Q3 2021, Tinder was the #3 app by consumer spend after TikTok and YouTube.

What is your take on the role of mobile device manufacturers and mobile carriers in the app economy in 2022?

Mobile carriers and device manufacturers play an important role in the app economy in 2022. Google Play is on track to represent over 70% of all downloads in 2021, and 35% of all spend, compared to iOS. Android devices have a much wider price point range, allowing more consumers worldwide to come online — a driving factor of mobile adoption in emerging markets like Brazil, India and Indonesia.

Improvements in infrastructure and the rollout of 5G from mobile carriers can foster better overall connectivity experiences. This is particularly true in terms of latency and lag, which can have meaningful impacts on core gaming on mobile — half of all time spent gaming. Battle Royale games like PUBG are a great example of real-time online multiplayer games that benefit from greater connectivity.

Especially in mobile-first markets, greater connectivity will foster a better internet experience on mobile and wider usage of mobile services. We expect to see this impact take shape in 2022 as smartphone penetration increases and mobile usage habits solidify.

Gijsbert Pols, Lead Product Strategist, Adjust 

Super-apps are already a big component of the Asian apps market. Do you think they will catch on in the USA and Europe in the coming year as some tech  forecasters have suggested?

Starting in APAC, but now in the U.S. and EMEA, as well as Latin America and Africa, a lot of your banking apps — PayPal being a notable example in the U.S. — have become much more like your financial lifestyle apps. This has created another interesting opportunity for your bank to play a much larger role in your day-to-day activities.

Take financial planning. Now, many banks are building that into their apps themselves. So there's a huge opportunity for banks to own many different segments of a consumer’s financial planning outside of just being their regular bank. Your banker that makes it the easiest to transfer across any system and to get information from any system will become the new age, modern bank that everyone uses. 

Robert Clarkson, Chief Revenue Officer at global payments and eCommerce platform, Payoneer 

Super-apps are already a big component of the Asian apps market. Do you think they will catch on in the USA and Europe in the coming year as some tech forecasters have suggested?  

While Asian markets have been much faster to adapt super-apps, it's clear that innovation is slowly coming to the West. Like with many mobile tech developments, Asia has led the charge and European and American companies are beginning to follow suit.  

For example, mobile and contactless payments, which are now a staple of everyday life for consumers and businesses across the world, have long been the norm across the Asia-Pacific, whilst the US and Europe were much slower to adopt this technology. I expect the super-app revolution to follow a similar trajectory, with Asia continuing to lead the way.

What we have seen across the UK and US is a movement towards blending different digital environments. The convergence of social media and eCommerce with the likes of Facebook and Instagram is a great example, with platforms adding shopping features to keep users from needing to complete purchases elsewhere.   

Super apps are a natural development of this merging of different digital environments. Consumers are increasingly demanding a more personalized, hyper convenient experience where one platform meets their every need. American and European companies will need to innovate faster to compete in the super-app race. 

2021 was meant to be the year that augmented reality really took off. Do you think consumers have really latched onto this technology, though? Do you see AR becoming more widespread this year, especially in e-commerce? 

2021 was supposed to be the year of AR in retail, but this hasn’t really happened. On the other hand, we’ve seen an explosion in live, social commerce as consumers look for more personalized shopping experiences. With hundreds of millions of people around the world confined to their homes, consumers quickly gravitated towards more visual mediums. The growing prominence of Twitch, TikTok and Facebook Live is just one demonstration of this.   

Live streaming has blended with the world of eCommerce in the past two years with a growing number of retailers and brands looking to connect to customers in new ways and stand out in an increasingly competitive landscape. For example, back in March 2020 Louis Vuitton became the first major high end fashion brand to live stream their upcoming 2020 summer collection via China's luxury retail app, Little Red Book. Other brands have since followed suit.   

In a digital-first commerce environment, it’s now critical to constantly find innovative ways to engage with consumers and stand out in the market. Consumers are looking for the immersivity of the physical retail experience in the digital world. AR and social commerce do enable businesses meet this demand, but live streaming will continue to dominate and even accelerate in 2022. We predict that the live streaming market is expected to be worth $183.3 billion by 2027.   

What are your app economy predictions for 2022?  

In 2022, I expect the race to become the world’s biggest truly global super app will really heat up. At the moment, we’re seeing many super apps operate within local markets rather than serving consumers across the globe. Soon some of the world’s biggest companies will develop super apps, offering multifaceted marketplaces rather than just a one-stop  service offering.  

What we’re also seeing is a movement of super apps from the consumer world to the business world. Just as consumers are looking for a single, tailored, streamlined experience, businesses are looking for a centralized app to run their digital operations, with SMBs in particular looking for a consumer-grade platform where they can receive and track sales, pay vendors, get financing, make investments, and more.   

As a result, the finance industry will also be front and center of the app economy in 2022, with fintechs, banks and financial services competing to create a single mobile experience that satisfies an array of financial service needs.

Hamish White, Founder and CEO of telecommunications software provider Mobilise

Super-apps are already a big component of the Asian apps market. Do you think they will catch on in the USA and Europe in the coming year as some tech forecasters have suggested?

The penetration of super-apps that we’ve seen in Asia is still a while away for US and European consumers. In principle, the idea of a super-app makes perfect sense in any market, but consumer behavior between these markets is very different. In Asian societies, many users’ first interaction with the Internet was via mobile devices, given fixed Internet penetration rates remained very low for a long time. Asian consumers therefore tend to be more familiar and comfortable — from a security perspective — with buying their products and services through mobile channels. Super-apps such as WeChat have become central to the lives of many in China and drive significant value for all stakeholders in their digital economy. In Western societies, decades of purchasing in retail stores or through web channels have established deep-rooted buying behaviors that aren’t easily shifted, which creates resistance to the evolution of the digital economy. Therefore, it's likely to be a while before super-apps arrive on Western shores.

Location-based technology and AI have already had a huge impact in terms of personalizing the smartphone experience. Yet, consumer research shows people want an even more tailored experience. Do you see any developments in this area being made in 2022?

Mobile operators in particular will be looking to prioritize investments into increasing the sophistication of their customer data management (CDM) tools to facilitate  hyper-personalization. We see now more than ever that consumers want the brands they buy from to make them feel seen, known and valued, and not like just another number in a customer database. At the same time, consumer demands and expectations are becoming increasingly specific.

To deliver a scalable personalized smartphone experience for their customers, businesses will need to invest in CDM tools that incorporate in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies. MDPs aggregate all a business’ data from siloed systems to create a uniform, accurate and centralized view of the customer, which can be used for  hyper-personalization. The benefit of using a separate data management system like an MDP is that they aren’t burdened with any other business activity or operational reporting, which allows them to operate at an unrivaled level of performance and deliver hyper-personalization in real-time and at scale. So developments in customer data management systems to deliver the level of personalization desired, and expected, from customers will be on the cards for businesses looking to improve their customers’ smartphone experience.

Jeff Watkins, Chief for Technology at AND Digital

Super-apps are already a big component of the Asian apps market. Do you think they will catch on in the USA and Europe in the coming year as some tech  forecasters have suggested? 

Super apps are attractive to the large-scale players because it provides an opportunity to keep people on-platform, or even curate their own app libraries outside of the Apple/Google Play stores. These side-step some of the rules and restrictions in place, which is a cause for concern. However, super apps also provide an opportunity for a more joined-up and personalized experience with lower friction in the user interactions. Users will often choose the path of least resistance without always considering the privacy  implications behind that seamless journey.  

The first large company in the west to provide a super app with a great user journey will probably see huge uptake, and probably spur on a new wave of aggregated digitization of services.

2021 was meant to be the year that augmented reality really took off. Do you think consumers have really latched onto this technology, though? Do you see AR  becoming more widespread this year, especially in e-commerce? 

We’ve heard a lot about the Metaverse in the back-end of 2021 and Facebook’s predictable land-grab in renaming themselves Meta, after their procurement of Oculus. Alongside this, uptake has shown that VR/AR/MR will become a dominant form of media by 2025. I personally don’t see AR becoming more ubiquitous in the next year or so until mobile devices become powerful enough to provide adequate environment perception capabilities, at which point Mixed Reality will likely take over.  

Virtual Reality will probably remain the media of choice for immersive gaming, including room-scale games becoming more popular, but AR and MR will become more popular as part of the cyberphysical convergence. For now, it feels a bit more of a gimmick as it’s missing its killer apps. Pokemon Go proved it can be a popular medium, but the failure and closure of Minecraft Earth shows that the market isn’t quite there yet. Will it go the way of 3D TV? I think not, it has too many practical uses.

What is your take on the role of mobile device manufacturers and mobile carriers in the app economy in 2022? 

Obviously, 5G is a big ticket item, but it requires better coverage and for us to think more about edge compute to take full advantage of it. The current chip shortage has not helped with movement in this area, but as this returns to normal, we will see 5G capabilities become the norm for all devices at all price points.  

This, along with more powerful devices will enable high-speed, low-latency AI tech, including more use of in-box capabilities like voice recognition (which Amazon have already implemented in their latest generation of Fire TV boxes). This in turn will enable us to better move towards VR/AR/MR as the standard, including the Metaverse.  

The ability to move more data around quickly means that digital twinning-based services will come to the user on the street, further enabling things like hyper-personalization and behavioral prediction. 

What will be the hot topics/emerging trends in mobile marketing next year? What are your app economy predictions? 

The app economy will continue to grow, but what we’re seeing now is a vast array of separate apps for each retailer, restaurant chain etc. I can see a world where we move more towards standard platforms or standardized applications that allow for a modern experience on a mobile device without the need to install and register for every physical venue a user visits. Referring back to the first point on super apps. I think people will undergo a bit of a consolidation journey, deciding on one platform (e.g. moving away from a mixture of native, Flutter/Dart, React Native etc. to one technology stack for  cost-effectiveness and agility).

Raj Shah, Head of Technology, Media, and Telecommunications Industry at Publicis Sapient 

Location-based technology and AI have already had a huge impact in terms of personalizing the smartphone experience. Yet, consumer research shows people want an even more tailored experience. Do you see any developments in this area being made in 2022?  

With the deprecation of 3rd party cookies and Apple’s new privacy rules, personalization and personalization on mobile, is becoming much harder. Telecom providers may be able to step into this void to assist with in-app personalization, through exposing some consumer metadata (based on preferences). All of the Big Three providers in the US are dabbling in this area, but all three have to balance privacy transparency with exposing more “personalizable” data.   

Google and Apple (with their dominance of share of mobile operating systems) will help set the framework for giving consumers control over their data. The telco operators will have to work within those frameworks to make their data available to app creators to create personalized-but-privacy-aware experiences. 

2021 was meant to be the year that augmented reality really took off. Do you think consumers have really latched onto this technology, though? Do you see AR becoming more widespread this year, especially in e-commerce?  

AR and VR will become more common in our lives in 2022, in part because hardware has advanced so that we don’t have to wear 30lbs of gear on our heads to experience it. Early adoption of Metaverse will happen as extensions of what we’re already seeing with Zoom, Slack, or Microsoft Teams. For example, business meetings could be moved out of a 2D screen-based environment to virtual environments featuring avatars that can emote based on AI processing of video camera feeds. 

In commerce, how people buy homes and cars may be made much more interactive. "Digital Twin" technologies will merge into the Metaverse, allowing for engineering, manufacturing, and other physical world industries to create and work in virtual environments (e.g. training and safety drills in the metaverse). 

In entertainment, shared experiences like concerts and sporting events could be held in hybrid modes – with some participants in real world venues, while others participate simultaneously in virtual simulations. 

Education will be fundamentally disrupted: Metaverse U could rise up to challenge the Harvards and MITs.

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