The Most Elegant App Survey

(Victoria)

The Most Elegant App Survey was conducted by Elegant Media, a Melbourne-based Mobile App Development Company, in the first quarter of 2023. Mobile Apps are becoming increasingly essential to our lives, and the way we use them is evolving. The amount of time we humans are spending on our Apps is exponentially growing. Data released in 2022 shows that we are on average spending 5 hours per day using the Apps on our phones.

When it comes to mobile Apps, our team at Elegant Media is always staying on top of the changes in user preferences. While there is a lot of data released every year on App usage, we felt there was an urgent need for a more intimate survey about people’s likes and dislikes when it comes to mobile Apps.

Since our head office is in Melbourne, we decided to start by surveying Victorians.

Why we did this survey

At Elegant Media, we love everything about Mobile Apps. We love designing Apps, developing them, marketing them and seeing them grow from an Idea into a fully functioning application that is helping users.

The way we interact with Apps is changing fast, and the pandemic only increased this rate of change. We wanted to find out what Apps users in Victoria like or dislike, what Apps they can’t live without, and what Apps they wish existed; these were some of the questions that we wanted answers to and since the answers did not exist, we decided to find out ourselves.

How the survey was conducted

The survey was conducted through face-to-face interviews and online questionnaires, targeting adults in the State of Victoria during the months of October (2022) & January and February (2023).

The interviews were mostly conducted in Melbourne, and were easily the most fun part of the process for us. It turns out we are not the only ones who are passionate about mobile Apps, most people these days are, and Victorians were more than willing to stop and talk to us about the Apps they love and hate.

The Most Elegant App Survey – Results

Victorians love and hate social media

We are all on social media, whether we like it or not. With 83% of all Australians using social media, we wanted to know how many love their social media Apps. Our first question was, which is the one App victorian’s love the most?

Our next question was the opposite, which is the one App Victorians have on their phone, but they hate that App. And the results were fascinating. It turns out Victorians love and hate social media Apps at the same time! 30% of respondents said that the Social Media App they hate the most is, believe it or not, Facebook.

While Facebook was way ahead of the pack, Instagram and Tiktok stood neck to neck in second and third positions with 17% and 15% of respondents saying they hate them. Snapchat was fourth with 12%, and the popular Apps Tinder and Hinge were lagging behind with 3% and 2% of the respondents saying they hated the dating Apps. While it ranked number one on our hate list, Facebook also ranks number one as the most popular social media platform in Australia.

The non-Social Media App people hate the most

While social media Apps were the most popular answer when asked which App people hated, we did get non-social media answers too. A staggering 31.9% of respondents indicated that the one non-social media mobile App that they use regularly but hate is the Public Transport Victoria (PTV) App.

Victorians use the PTV mobile App very often to get around; however, the App not being easy to use was why it ranked number one in being ‘necessary’ but ‘irritating to use’ mobile application.

To our surprise, Google Maps was in second place with 23.4% and the third position was occupied by Spotify, which was also a surprise. Uber came in fourth place with 8.5%, followed by Gmail, Canva, Vodafone and the Apple Watch App, each with around 4%.

The most important App for Victorians! iOS vs Android

Australians have an average of 100 Apps on their phones. What if we could only keep one App? Which one would we keep?

That’s the question we asked Victorians. And while Instagram was one of the favourites, we had some interesting differences in the answers we got from Android vs iOS users.

Android users love WhatsApp!

One of the most interesting data sets that we got from the survey was the disparity between iOS and Android users when it comes to WhatsApp.

The hugely popular chat App, which has 2.24 billion monthly users worldwide, was not at all popular with iOS users in Victoria. To the point that it didn’t even rank in the top 15 favourite Apps for Apple users. But was extremely popular with Android users.

WhatsApp ranked 3rd as the one App android users love the most. With 13.8% of Android users saying WhatsApp was their favourite App.

WhatsApp also ranked 3rd as the one App Android users will choose to keep on their phones with 15.6% saying they would choose WhatsApp if they could only have one App on their phone.

Victorians willing to pay up to $10 a month to use their favourite social media App

Social media apps have always been free to use. The business model is simple, they give us a free App, we give them our attention, they make money by running ads.

But is it time for a new business model for social media Apps? Our data revealed that it might just be time to change the way we use social media Apps. A majority of users in Victoria would be willing to fork out up to 10$ per month to use their favourite social media Apps.

The majority 46% of the people we surveyed said they would pay up to 5$ per month to continue using their favourite social media App compared to only 19.8% who would not use them if they were paid.

About 26% of the surveyed people were also ready to pay up to $10/month for the App and about 8% were open to paying more than $10 as well. Some of our respondents also suggested they would prefer their favourite social media App to be paid and free of Ads or at least have an ad free option.

Maybe it’s time for paid social media Apps that are ad-free?

The lockdown was great for Netflix

The fortunes of many mobile Apps were decided by the declaration of a Global Pandemic on March 11, 2020. The Covid-19 Pandemic forced Victorians to stay at home and get on with their lives.

This meant that without having to go to work or school in person, a whole new model of remote working and learning was born. The result of this was increased levels of disposable time that smartphone users were more than happy to spend on Apps such as Netflix.

In our survey, 18.1% of Victorians said that Netflix App was their favourite App during the lockdown making it the 3rd most popular App during the lockdowns. But today, Netflix does not even make it into the Top 10 Apps that Victorians love, with only 2.1% of Victorians saying it’s currently their favourite App.

This can be clearly attributed to the fact that more and more users are now preferring to engage in other social or work related tasks rather than stay and home and Netflix and chill.

The one App people wish existed

Mobile Apps can do many things these days, but what we wanted to know was which is the one App Victorians wish existed. An App of their dreams.

In a world with over 8 million different mobile applications (3.553 million apps in the Google Play Store and 1.642 million in the Apple App Store), our data indicates that most Victorians (23%) are happy with the Apps that are coming out these days and are looking forward to what is coming out in the future.

In the second position, with 10% of respondents wishing for it was a Messanger-like App for Instagram. With a lot of people using Instagram as their main source to communicate with friends and family, a messenger like Instagram App will allow them to do so without other distractions.

Another common answer was an App that can help us with a regular health checkups. An App that could run a blood test or a body scan, check our blood sugar levers and other health indicators? Something tells me this App is not too far away.

The other 62% of our respondents gave us some very unique and sometimes absurd answers for what they would like their dream App to do.

There were the following main groups of Apps people are wishing for.

Apps that can help us find things, like Toilets, local shows, Garage sales etc.

Smart Apps with AI that can do things like, invest our money, edit our photos and videos, and tell us what to cook, amongst other things.

Everything Apps that integrate multiple different things in one single App.

Apps that integrate AR/VR technology in ingenious ways, like AR grocery shopping Apps, VR art galleries etc.

And then there were some that were straight-up wishful thinking. An App that can print some money, now who would not download that App.

These answers perhaps offer hints to future mobile app entrepreneurs to identify and provide the answer to common everyday problems – which all the best Apps in the world do.

Top 5 Takeaways