The untold "app gap" story, Part I: Human behavior, the overlooked variable

I ended the Windows Phone isn't dead series with an analysis of Microsoft's strategy to address the infamous app gap.
The app gap, as we know, is the issue most blamed for Windows Phone's market woes. We often read articles and comments that assert and reassert the advantages the vast repository of apps available for the iPhone and Android phones provide those platforms. The fact that Windows phone has a comparatively much smaller app catalog, of approximately 500,000 apps compared to its competitors 1.5 million, leads many to presume that this disparity invariably leads to a subpar smartphone experience for the average smartphone user who chooses Windows phone.

What is often overlooked is the human behavior factor that drives the smartphone-app-experience story.

Despite the undeniable quantity and limited quality app disparity between Windows Phone apps and those of the leading platforms, however, the app gap story is much bigger than the abridged tale that is usually presented by other writers and commenters. Most of the dialog on this subject focuses solely on the empirical data of the size of competing app stores. What is often overlooked is the human behavior factor that drives the smartphone-app-experience story.

Ignoring this critical human behavior factor is like trying to tell a story without including the characters that drive the plot. Sure you have the setting but how is the environment engaged? And at what points are different aspects of the environment interacted with and how frequently? How does the environment drive character development? Though the setting is an important and vital part of a story, its role is to help the reader better understand the characters. The character is the focus.
Many who have narrated the "app gap story" have placed the focus on the setting: the size (or lack thereof) of the mobile platform's app stores. However, it is we, the smartphone users, who are the characters and therefore the legitimate focus of the story. In this series, we will look at the 2015 US Mobile App Report to present an analysis of the human behavior variable of the app gap story. This first piece is an introduction of that analysis and a prelude to a much deeper dive into the data that will follow in parts II and III.

I realize that the demographic focused on in this report excludes a global audience. So it cannot be definitively asserted by the data that this analysis applies to all smartphone users. That said it is reasonable to conclude many aspects of human behavior in relation to app engagement are consistent across varying demographics.

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