The Fruit Fly Product Lifecycle

Fruit flies live for an average of 45 days from the moment an egg is laid. It really is not very long, but here is something that in reality has an even shorter lifespan – an app.

According to a number of specialists in the area apps including Josh Clark who shows in his book Tapworthy that the life of the average app on the average user’s phone is less than 30 days. In that 30 days the user is likely to open the app up to a total of 20 times on average.

And this has what to do with the price of onions?

Well think of it this way. Most of you know about Moore’s law of computing that essentially says speed doubles every two years, well what if there was a similar one for some markets?

The app market is one, where hundreds if not thousands of hours go into developing apps before they launch. When they do launch they have a finite amount of time to make it into the charts and make it big before something better comes along. The worst part of it is that all of this is measured in days now, especially when you consider that there are now more than 19,000 new apps released in the Apple App store every month

Part of this may well be the hype around becoming rich on the back of apps, so there is a kind of ‘app rush’ as everyone tries to get their share.

However I think more fundamentally the desire for new and exciting things in the market is such that consumers in particular are happy to buy and discard purchases in a cycle shorter than the life of a fruit fly.

The point of this little article is to suggest that you might want to ask yourself a question. Do I sell products and services that are not serious investments and will this kind of fruit fly lifecycle start to affect my business?

If it will what does that mean for your products and your business?  What can you do to turn the fruit fly product lifecycle to your advantage?

Next week, I’ll be posting 3 entries on the blog to help you with some ideas about how to turn very short product lifecycles to your advantage. In the mean time I hope this helps and it would be great to hear your thoughts and ideas on the subject.