(Goodbye, native mobile apps...) - are we saying native mobile apps are dead? No, obviously not. There are clearly huge opportunities on home screens for all sorts of apps, media and otherwise. When it comes to native apps for digital-first magazine and book publishers, however, the proposition has become pretty clear. Native mobile apps are best if you are:
1. Aggregating content from a wide variety of publications (Flipboard, Longform, and Pocket all do this extremely well), or
2. Command an audience so vast, and push out so much daily stuff, that you believe a significant segment of your loyal readership will check your app on a very regular basis—and you have the resources to produce an app that is a unique experience (say, The New York Times or BuzzFeed).
Outside of those two categories, the reasoning gets thin. While native mobile apps may seem like a way to reach a new audience, and while with the right attention or a bit of luck you can no doubt get some folks to download your app, these days the tradeoff in what you lose by devoting any development, production, or support time to them is generally not going to be worth it. For subscription-based digital-first publications, the proposition becomes even worse: You lose both customer information and a significant chunk of revenue to the platform owner at very little gain.