A lot of mobile development firms are working on smartphone games, but Mixpanel CEO Suhail Doshi argues that there might be a better opportunity in creating enterprise apps for tablets.
People spend a lot of time with tablets: while tablets account for only 19 percent of mobile devices sold, they also account for 25 percent of time spent with mobile devices, according to Mixpanel data. That suggests that mobile developers could see good revenue from tablets.
Because so many developers are building games, it might make more sense to target an app category with less competition and one that is well suited to the tablet format. “I think the apps that will start to succeed on tablets are the ones that give you more creative freedom to build something. If you look at Photoshop, for example, you couldn’t ever really build Photoshop on your phone. It would just be too complex to do,” Doshi explains. “But, you could do it on a tablet because there are more areas that you can build with, more options that you can mess with. I think you could build a more powerful app. I think that is where there where some of these guys in the middle ground can succeed.”