by sginteractiveEstimated reading time: 4 minute(s)
1. Change of lifestyle
The circuit breaker has allowed us to be more home-centric, be it work or play, our lifestyles in the past few months have been involving home. Examples are home workouts, working from home, and spending more time on media. These lifestyle changes made us embraced technology more and intervened in the use of mobile apps in our daily lives. For example, using a home-workout app that you would not have downloaded if not for the circuit breaker. Or having your child use an app for learning at home. All these lifestyle changes had led to more mobile apps being created and put into the marketplace, based on the sole reason of Covid-19.
2. Contact tracing and health monitoring apps
Some businesses are trying to make contact tracing and health monitoring apps to combat the Covid-19 virus outbreak. Due to Covid-19, people are also becoming more health-conscious and businesses are taking this opportunity to make apps to cater to the needs of those who want to monitor personal health levels.
3. Increase in Retail Ecommerce
Covid-19 has eroded the sales from brick-and-mortar stores in Singapore with the strict restrictions of the circuit breaker. Singapore’s retail sales have suffered the biggest drop since 1986 with a drop of 40.5% year on year according to data released by the Department of Statistics on June 5. Excluding motor vehicles, retail sales fell 32.8 per cent. It is therefore not surprising that small businesses have scrambled to migrate their transactions online within the past few months, to cater to the surge in demand for their products and services via eCommerce.
These businesses, especially retail, are migrating online and starting to use mobile apps to cope with their increased online customer demands.
4. Businesses start to realise the importance of mobile apps
Being forced to go online and having staff work remotely from home during this period has made many Singaporean businesses realise how important it is to be digitalised and have an edge over the competition with a mobile app. With the jostling over customers’ attention and satisfaction in this online space, an app could bring so much better user experience and is a great tool to build branding. In marketing terms, having a mobile app could bring better branding benefits as compared to just having a website. This is because apps are more personalised, can allow for more gestures thus better user interface and experience, and also make customers more attached to your brand. Nonetheless, this realisation of the benefits a mobile app could do for their businesses increased the demand for mobile apps to be developed in this period.
5. Change of careers
Due to the massive loss of jobs, some Singaporeans finally took the leap of faith to start their own online businesses and look to have a mobile app developed for their new business.
6. More games
Since the circuit breaker, the schooling population has more time to spend on playing mobile games and this caused more mobile gaming apps to be developed to cater to this golden opportunity of potentially becoming the next Angry Birds.
7.Food delivery
With us cooped up at home, the food delivery apps have been a frequent occurrence for many of us. With the high demand, comes high delivery fees. Some new mobile food delivery apps have been developed to cater to in-house delivery and for other food options such as juices and supplements.
8.Health-conscious
People are definitely more health conscious after this unexpected scare of the Covid-19. Health-related apps to track personal health are being developed to cater to this segment. Examples could range from sleep tracking apps to apps that remind you to drink water.
9.Budget-friendly
In 2020, the cost of developing a mobile app is not as much as you may think. With the advances in technology and expertise, it could cost much lesser than that of the past and would definitely be a worthy investment after looking at the increased profits and branding benefits it brings to the company.
10.Government funding in the Covid-19 period
In addition to it all, another reason for the increased demand in mobile apps during this period is because of the heavy funding the government is providing for businesses which want to digitally transform their businesses through the Enterprise Development Grant (EDG) which could cover up to 90% for your transition to going digital if you take it up within these 6 months. This is the perfect time to make use of these government grants to improve your business’s digital presence and usability.
If you think any one of the above had crossed your mind and still you haven’t jumped in to automate yourself using mobile apps development as a Singapore Enterprise, read this
“As announced at Supplementary Budget 2020, the maximum support level will be raised to 80% from 1 April 2020 to 31 December 2020. For enterprises that are most severely impacted by COVID-19, the maximum support level may be raised to 90% on a case-by-case basis.” – Enterprisesg.gov.sg