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"Recently, Google split up its Drive apps into three separate standalone apps: Sheets, Slides, and Docs. Facebook separated its chat offering, Messenger, into its own standalone app, and Foursquare broke its app in two\u00A0to launch Swarm, an app focused on social mapping. A strategy that all of these large tech companies share: the conscious uncoupling of products colloquially called\u00A0unbundling.\r\nThe unbundling of technology is the act of breaking something into smaller parts \u2013 whether that\u2019s a product, service, piece of content or app. In the case of Foursquare, Facebook, and Google, however, this unbundling was all about streamlining the app experience to focus on one thing that people want to do and doing it really well. \u00A0\r\n\r\nUnbundling for a better user experience\u00A0\r\n\u201CWe spend a lot of time talking to people about Foursquare, and we constantly hear how people use Foursquare for two things - the keep up and meet up with friends, and to discover great places.\u00A0But, as it turns out, each time they open the app, it's almost always do just one of those things,\u201D said Brendan Lewis, head of communications at Foursquare in an interview with The Next Web.\r\n\u201CThat's the main driver for our decision to unbundle these two experiences into two separate apps: to make the experience better for both use cases.\u201D\r\n\r\nThe decision to unbundle Foursquare into two apps wasn\u2019t just based on a hunch. Noah Weiss, Foursquare\u2019s vice president of product management told The Verge that just five percent of Foursquare\u2019s users were opening the app to find friends and a restaurant.\r\nThat means that the other 95 percent of users were opening the app to find either a recommendation-based result or to check-in \u2013 hence the decision to split the app into two apps: Foursquare and now Swarm.\u00A0\r\n\r\nUnbundling as a strategy: Mainly for the mega tech\u00A0companies\u00A0\r\nAt its core, unbundling makes perfect sense \u2013 watch how users are experiencing an app and separate the experiences to make them more useful or meaningful. But for many smaller app companies, this strategy is unrealistic.\r\n\u201CUnbundling is completely untenable for smaller companies. The only reason that companies like Facebook, Google, and Foursquare able to do it is because they're giants in the space,\u201D said Mark Burstiner, senior product manager at the mobile design agency Fueled told us in an interview.\r\n\r\nBurstiner argues that app developers should figure out their minimum value proposition, find the data to support it, and then build the app feature-by-feature. This approach saves the developer from launching an app with multiple user experiences and having to unbundle sometime in the future.\u00A0\r\n\u201CYou don't want your app to be like the diner menu with a million things on it - you want to be the boutique restaurant that does a few things really well, and slowly adds new menu items as they draw in a crowd,\u201D he added.\u00A0\r\nThe crowded diner menu being apps like Google Drive, which was recently unbundled into three standalone apps.\r\n\r\nFoursquare:\u00A0The unbundling exception?\r\n\u201CListen, the point of the company, this whole thing, was never to build an awesome check-in button,\u201D Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley told The Verge. Foursquare's goal was to build a social application around exploration and finding friends, which ultimately led to a massive influx of check-in and tip data, now helping to fuel its recommendation engine.\r\nThis deliberate evolution and now conscious unbundling seems far more deliberate than unbundling because there were too many minimum value propositions, or none at all.\r\n\u201CIt\u2019s the difference between throwing a bunch of stones and hitting a bunch of birds or realizing that you didn't have to throw so many stones in the first place,&amp;quot;\u00A0Burstiner said. &amp;quot;Foursquare hit two very big birds: the check-in market to glean data and the recommendation market to make it sing.\u201D\r\n\r\nUnbundling to inform startups\r\n\r\n\u201CThis whole strategy is still really, really young. What\u2019s interesting is that it\u2019s going to shape how startups approach their app development. It forces startups think differently,\u201D Burstiner added.\u00A0\r\nThe trend of unbundling, which has fueled a hyper awareness around user experience, will no doubt help startups think about what their app\u2019s true minimum value proposition, therefore creating more focused user experiences.\r\nFor smaller companies, this means concentrating on their own set of current design trends: niche marketplaces, offering just\u00A0one core product,\u00A0and taking advantage of the hyperlocal and personalized Web.\r\n\u201CThe idea of a unbundling forces startups to go back to the drawing board and figure out what is important to the user.&amp;quot;\r\nHopefully, the trend makes\u00A0for more streamlined apps and better user experiences, though whether users would be bothered by downloading multiple apps for multiple purposes is still up for debate.\r\nSee also: Smartphones: The silent killer of the Web as you know it"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/05/06/large-tech-companies-hopping-app-unbundling-trend/>