December 31, 2017
This New Jersey town is closing its roadsand blaming navigation apps
Homeowners aren’t happy when your navigation app steers you away from traffic and onto their street—and now they’re fighting back. Leonia, New Jersey is closing more than 60 streets to everyone but residents and workers during morning and afternoon peak hours because apps like Google Maps, Waze, and Apple Maps are causing “crisis proportion” congestion in small neighborhood roads, according to a New York Times report.
Starting in mid-January, the police force in the New Jersey town will close a large section of roads to outsiders looking to find a faster route away from traffic-filled highways. To enforce the new rule, residents of the town will be issued yellow tags to hang from their rearview mirrors. Those who use the streets without the pass will be subject to $200 fines.
“Without question, the game changer has been the navigation apps,” said Tom Rowe, Leonia’s police chief. “In the morning, if I sign onto my Waze account, I find there are 250,000 ‘Wazers’ in the area. When the primary roads become congested, it directs vehicles into Leonia and pushes them onto secondary and tertiary roads. We have had days when people can’t get out of their driveways.”
The major navigation apps have been notified of the changes. Waze, perhaps the biggest culprit for sending its users through neighborhoods and small town centers, acknowledged the rules and said it would comply with whatever changes are made.
“If a road is legally reclassified into a private road,” a spokesperson at the Google-owned company told the NY Times, “our map editors will make that change. It is our goal to work holistically with our community of drivers, map editors, and city contacts to improve the driving experience for all.”
The company defended its practice by explaining how it works with municipalities to help them determine if new infrastructure is effective. For example, if a town wants to put a roundabout in the middle of their town, Waze will send them traffic data so they can better determine what effect it will have.
Leonia, with a population of just 9,000, is in a particularly dire situation as it sits next to one of the nation’s most congested highways. But it’s not the only one. Other towns have placed speed bumps and signs to deter app users from flooding their streets. Those measures aren’t always effective, so towns from Massachusetts to California are now ramping up their efforts and turning to local regulation.
There are still questions as to whether the rules will hold up if the city is taken to court. The state of New Jersey ultimately owns the roads and can decide to open them back up to commuters. There are concerns that the restrictions could do more harm than good. If a driver or passenger needs urgent care, they could potentially lose precious time getting to a hospital if they are pulled over for not having a yellow tag.
Read more: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/waze-shut-down-roads/
January 21, 2018
Global app downloads topped 175 billion in 2017, revenue surpassed $86 billion
by MeDaryl • Cars • Tags: App Annie, apps, china, Downloads, india, Mobile
Global app downloads topped 175 billion and consumer spending exceeded $86 billion in 2017, thanks to growth in emerging markets including China, India, Brazil and Russia, according to a new report from App Annie out this morning. Notably, India has now become the number two country by downloads, passing the U.S., which is now third. China has long since been in the lead.
The difference between the total downloads App Annie is reporting (175b) and the 91.5 billion recently reported by the firm Sensor Tower in its own year-end wrap-up can be attributed to how the data was gathered. Sensor Tower’s figures are drawn from the iOS App Store and Google Play. App Annie, however, also includes third-party Android stores in its analysis – that’s how it has visibility into China, where Google Play doesn’t have a presence.
India becoming the second largest country in terms of downloads is a significant change in the worldwide app market over this past year.
Downloads grew 215 percent over the past two years in the country, compared with 125 percent growth in China, and negative 5 percent growth in the U.S.
top countries by downloads 2017
app downloads worldwide 2017
App Annie notes that app usage in India was driver by the introduction of subsidised, unlimited 4G access by Jio in September 2016, which has allowed users to come online in large numbers.
Although the U.S. has now become a more mature market, App Annie says there’s still a significant volume of absolute downloads here, as well.
For example, the firm found that U.S. users downloaded 3 apps per month, and at least 70 percent downloaded at least one. It’s worth pointing out that this stands in contradiction to earlier data from comScore which has continually reported that the majority of U.S. users don’t download any apps per month.
Related to this, App Annie claims that users aren’t just downloading apps – they’re engaging at record levels, too. In most markets, the average smartphone user has more than 80 apps on their phone, and uses close to 40 of them per month (or between one-third and one-half of the apps on their phone per month, on average).
In addition, consumers are spending nearly 3 hours in apps per day on average, and the markets analyzed (see below) have averaged nearly 30 percent growth in average daily time spent since 2015.
In a number of markets, including the U.S., Brazil, Russia, and others (see below), smartphone users spent 7x more time in mobile apps than on the mobile web, and access them 13x more often.
While India has surged in terms of downloads as more users come online, those figures don’t necessarily translate into revenues. Instead, the U.S. remains the number two market by gross consumer spend, behind China but still ahead of India.
top countries consumer spend apps 2017
consumer spend apps 2017
Consumer spend in app stores – including the iOS App Store, Google Play and third-party Android stores – has more than doubled over the past two years, to top $86 billion by the end of 2017. The top markets by consumer spend have all seen double-digit percentage growth during this time, with China in the lead (+270%), followed by the U.S. (+75%), India (+60%), Brazil (+80%) and Russia (+35%).
The app market will continue to grow next year, as well. App Annie’s recent 2018 forecast pegged consumer spending worldwide to top $110 billion in 2018.
The new report also delves into app categories that did well in 2017, including finance/fintech, retail, video streaming, travel/ride-sharing, gaming, and social, and it spends some time analyzes China’s market in particular. You can request the full report here on App Annie’s site.
Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/17/global-app-downloads-topped-175-billion-in-2017-revenue-surpassed-86-billion/