How big should your mobile zoo or attraction app be?
The first experience a guest will have with your mobile app is getting it loaded on their phone so they can start using it. For native apps, this means going into an app store, downloading the app, installing it, and loading it up. For web apps, this means scanning a QR code or entering a URL and waiting for the app to load in a mobile browser. In both cases, the size of the app can make a huge difference on how long a visitor will be waiting to get to the content and functionality they’re looking for.
In many zoos, it can be difficult to get a fast and reliable internet connection, which exacerbates the problem of loading really large mobile apps. For this article, we gathered info about mobile app sizes across zoos, theme parks, ski areas, and cruise lines. Here’s what we found.
Native Zoo Apps
We sampled 11 native mobile apps in the zoo industry and found that the average size is 65.8 MB. The largest in the group was Zoo Miami’s at 117.9 MB and the smallest was Memphis Zoo’s at 36.9 MB.
Download Times
Without context though, these numbers don’t mean much. So let’s estimate how long it would take to download these apps. According to Statista, the average speed of cellular networks in 2023 is 27 megabits per second (note: 1 megabyte roughly equals 8 megabits). This means the average zoo app would download in about 21 seconds at the average speed. Memphis would be about 12 seconds and Zoo Miami at 37 seconds.
Of course, these are just average download speeds. Again, zoos can be a tough place to get a good internet connection. What if data transfers at only 50% that speed? or 25%? This would lead to some apps requiring 2 minutes or more to download. According to a survey by Digital.com, 50% of website visitors will abandon a website if it takes more than 6 seconds to load. Guests’ tolerance for downloading a native app may be higher, but the point remains that people expect to get to digital content quickly these days.
Similar Industries
How do zoo app sizes stack up against similar industries? Well, not too bad actually. Most apps for similar industries are quite a bit larger than the average zoo app and many are larger than Zoo Miami’s - the largest in our set of zoo apps. For example, Disney World’s app is a whopping 545.8 MB.
But there’s a problem with just comparing the size of zoo apps to some of these other examples; and that’s the context of when and where the app is likely first downloaded and installed. In the case of many theme parks, ski areas, and cruises; guests will get the app well in advance of their visit. For example, Disney World visitors might install the app months in advance at the time of their initial ticket purchase.
We know from research and experience that the majority of zoo visitors will wait until they are on-site before first accessing the mobile app and/or digital map. This means they don’t have the benefit of a home wifi connection and don’t necessarily have the patience to wait minutes before getting to the app.
Big Apples vs. Small Oranges
So far we’ve just been talking about native apps - the kind where guests have to download the entirety of the app, and often a lot of content, up-front before they can use it. SmartParks and many other mobile apps are built differently. They’re called Progressive Web Apps. The gist of it is that they look and act like native mobile apps, but run inside of a web browser. In other words, they’re a bit of a hybrid between a regular old website and a native app.
This distinction is relevant when we talk about app size and performance because you can’t directly measure or compare the two. That said, we can talk about mobile web app performance as it practically relates to how quickly a guest will get to the content they’re looking for.
Case Study: The Bronx Zoo
The Bronx Zoo’s mobile web app and digital map were built on the SmartParks platform. When a guest follows a QR code or enters bronxzoo.com/today, they’re taken directly to the app. The first couple of things they’ll often access are the home screen and the map.
The home screen weighs in at 996 KB, or in other words, just under 1 MB. This equates to less than a 1 second load time at an average cellular data speed and only about 2 seconds at a particularly slow speed. Similarly, the interactive map is quite lean at only 565 KB.
Added up, the whole SmartParks app is around 2MB. Beyond that initial payload, the rest of the content is transferred as needed to guests’ devices.
Why are native apps so big?
There are two common reasons why many native apps can be so large.
They’re packaging up all the code and content that make up the app and transferring it at one time at the beginning. There are some benefits to this, but it comes at a high cost of transferring a lot of data that the user won’t necessarily ever need or access.
Many native apps bundle extra code and libraries that they’re not fully using. Modern code frameworks are great, but they can also be bloated and even malicious. Native apps often include libraries from companies like Facebook and Google that provide some functionality, but also contain tracking scripts and other code that can inflate the size of the app.
Final Thoughts
This was a classic blog post where I asked a question in the title and didn’t really answer it. How big should your mobile zoo app be? The best answer I can give is “as small as possible.” There’s a direct correlation between speed and user happiness when it comes to getting to digital content.
With SmartParks, we are fully focused on optimizing the time it takes guests to get to the content they’re looking for. We believe that for zoos and similar attractions, the best experience is to get to the initial content in no more than a couple of seconds. While some people may be willing to wait longer, there are others that will give up or just be quietly frustrated while they sit there for 30 seconds or several minutes to get into your app.