Yahoo is in turmoil right now with Carol Bartz sent out on her f**king behind and the company potentially being up for sale. We thought it would be a good time to take a look at the company’s mobile apps and see if these are any good and how Yahoo can improve on the mobile side of things.
I’m a firm believer that Yahoo needs to make a coherent push that places mobile, social and location first. To be fair to Bartz, she reorganized the company to disband its dedicated mobile division in favor of building in mobile to all products from the ground up. What are the results?
It’s very, very mixed. The Flickr apps are available on nearly every platform out there and do provide an easy way to view or upload your mobile photos on the go. I know Yahoo gets a lot of guff for buying Flickr but it has exponentially increased the user base since it’s taken over.
I guess the criticism is that there is so much excitement in mobile photography and it seems like Flickr is just playing it safe. All of the cool kids are playing with Instagram or Camera+ and things like the instant upload in Google+ are making Yahoo’s Flickr somewhat irrelevant for all but the most die-hard Flickr user.
One area where Yahoo is kicking ass is with sports, as its Sportacular app and its various fantasy programs have huge audiences that are actively engaged with these programs. While I do think apps like SportCaster are showing more innovation, you can’t really complain too much about Yahoo’s performance in this area.
Yahoo Mail, Messenger and Finance are all solid but not spectacular. What’s troubling is that Yahoo has shown some signs of real innovation in the mobile space but haven’t followed through with a great, mass-market product. Its Sketch A Search app was an interesting experiment in gesture-based searching, LiveStand could have been a cool FlipBoard killer and we haven’t heard a thing about the acquired IntoNow techology.
Like Yahoo as a whole, the company’s mobile products are full of promise but too often show signs of complacency and a lack of unified strategy. Hopefully, whoever leads Yahoo next can take all of those positives and execute with mobile in mind. For a great take on how Yahoo needs to go even further with mobile in its future strategy, check out this great post on MediaPost. It’s good stuff.