Investors may be tiring of mobile apps

Every day, when skim-reading press releases in my inbox or scanning RSS feeds of new releases from the major App Stores, I feel tired.

Tired of no-hope Instagram homages, bad homescreen fonts, Kim Kardashian live wallpapers, crap Talking Tom Cat rip-offs, APP TITLES IN CAPITALS, endless unauthorised One Direction fan apps, dubstep drum pads, "hot lingerie girls", badly-scraped e-books and Angry Birds clones.

The long tail of the apps world certainly isn`t lonely, but it is depressing. And the ennui extends to the more professional tier of seen-it-before apps.

Like second-screen social TV startups (`Wait, not that many people are using the existing ones`). Or cutesy social freemium games with animals (`$69.99 for some gems? My child will like that!`). Or purely-promotional musician apps (`How have I coped until now without a way to read your tweets on a phone?`). And so on.

And all this probably isn`t a problem, because the dynamics of the app stores ensure that the vast majority of these apps will sink without trace, with only their developers and journalists foolish enough to immerse themselves in the app release stream ever knowing they existed.

Even so: tired. Yet what may be a more worrying sign for the apps industry – note the "may" there, which I`ll come back to later – is the suggestion that investors may be tiring of the consumer-focused mobile apps industry.

Read this blog post by Fred Wilson, a partner at VC firm Union Square Ventures who has invested in several startups in this space.

He notes three recent trends: the fact that the consumer web has matured – "it is harder than ever to build a large audience from a standing start" – the way consumers are moving from desktop/web to mobile/app use, and the fact that "momentum/late stage investors have moved from consumer to enterprise".