If you are one of the founders trying to create a new mobile application or an investor trying to decide if an application has lasting value, it is useful to separate the ways in which people use applications into four categories. The loss of time is the most popular games. Some applications are sometimes used as a waste of time and sometimes public services – for example, Face book is both a waste of time (updates state control a few minutes) and utility (sending Face book messages). Loss of time tends to be ephemeral. It is easy to get hooked on new games and also easy to get tired of them. If you want to build a great company that builds waste of time, you need to build a machine that builds markets and monetize applications like Zing did.
In general, utilities are the basic apps on your home screen: camera, phone, contacts, SMS, calendar, etc. basic utilities to map usage patterns deeply rooted that usually existed before modern smart phones . In the past, may be carried around a paper organizer, a standalone camera, the basic public services, etc. tend to be very sticky – if you win the widespread adoption of a basic public service, you can build lasting value. An entry strategy for a start-up is to replace a basic utility. This is what Integra has done for the application integrated camera. It is unclear whether the “Integra for video” corporations are basic utilities (replacement app video) or loss of time.
Creating a new database utility does not replace a utility base current is very difficult. Foursquare seems to have done this for users who regularly check-in. episodic services are applications that typically are not on the home screen, but are extremely useful in certain situations. Some examples: Chipmunk when purchasing tickets, Umber where you need a car, and Open Table for making restaurant reservations. Commercial success episodic targets a well-defined position and become deeply involved in this situation. Make an application that is too large or has multiple uses situations can hurt you. Because many of these situations involve the purchase, these applications tend to be monetizable. This is an emerging category. Android has a good notification system for some time, but the iPhone does notifications in useful IOS 5. People tend to activate notifications for communications applications such as email, SMS, etc.
So far, notifications for other applications did not get widespread adoption because, among other things: it is easy to annoy users by informing them about the race-and non-communication an application in the background tends to drain the battery life. Expect this category to grow applications become smarter about when and notify battery life improves dramatically over the next year or two. A second obstacle is that the relationship with the consumer application may be too low to provide enough information for ad targeting relevant. For example, Foursquare has traditionally been used as a vehicle check-in, largely oriented places food and drinks. So its generally lacking Explore tab bars and restaurants, the arena where Foursquare has collected data for most consumers. It becomes more difficult for Foursquare to sell advertising to accounting when it is not positioned as a customer service used to find accountants.
Source:
http://www.ahcolorful.com/2012/12/four-types-of-mobile-applications-2/