Space crunch: E-comm apps go lite
E-commerce firms are fighting for the consumers’ phone space along with their wallet share as they try to widen their reach to smaller towns and cities. Since a majority of the country’s 650 million smartphone users have devices with a ROM (read only memory) ranging between 8GB to 32GB, there’s not enough enough space to store lot of apps.
In their effort not to miss out on such consumers, e-commerce firms are either coming out with a lighter version of their shopping apps which will not take much space in lower-end smartphones, or resizing their apps. Around 80-85% e-commerce activity happens through mobile phones, so it’s important that every segment is catered to.
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Meesho, for instance has brought down the size of its app to 13MB from 26MB. Amazon India, on the other hand has an adjustable feature. Its app size is 60MB but on phones with less storage space, a lighter 1MB version, gets downloaded.
Facebook was among the first social media platforms to launch a lite version of its app in 2015, which was about 2MB in size and could work even on 2G networks.
Sanjeev Barnwal, co-founder and chief technology officer of Meesho, said, “We have the smallest app in terms of size in Play Store, compared to our peers. We have always been particular about making sure that our app size is smallest and performs well on low-end smartphones”.
According to Kishore Thota, director, customer experience and marketing, Amazon India, app download size needs to be optimised so that consumers can have a hassle-free experience. “For low-end Android smartphones, we have a separate flavour of the app that is lighter than the main app,” he said.
Bharath Ram, senior vice president, user acquisition and retention, Flipkart, said to keep the app lightweight, developers have found a balance between loading certain features upfront and some features in the background if needed. “This is a continuous journey and we keep on innovating around this,” Ram added.
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Foodtech platform Zomato also continuously works on optimising its apps size so that phone memory does not act as an entry barrier for any consumer.
Navkendar Singh, associate vice president at IDC India, said around 90% of smartphones in use would be less than Rs 25,000 and therefore would not have high memory or storage space.