Mobile apps strategy for the Barcelona City Council

The Barcelona City Hall trusted Metodian to do a report on its mobile apps ecosystem and asked for an analysis focusing in three different aspects: the process before deciding what apps are done and how are done technically, the overall performance of the current set of apps and the way how these apps are advertised to citizens.

As it is good to move to any digital-presence element, a local authority’s mobile apps ecosystem ought to keep a balance between being broad enough to provide citizens with a sufficient, varied and rich service and being moderate enough to justify the efforts made for creating, maintaining and updating and allocating resources that matter.

Metodian benchmarked the mobile apps ecosystem of cities comparable with Barcelona to understand which apps are these cities putting at disposal of their citizens, how do they work with existing platforms, how many apps does every city advertise and whether they have a directory for classifying apps under.

The report made after the analysis also briefed key stakeholders in matters such as how providers work with open source components to build apps, what is the review process to publish an app in the Apple App Store or Google Play, how proximity marketing tech works, how the efforts in this area can be better communicated to citizens and the general public and on the intersection between regulatory and tech issues, among other things.

The analysis was made taking account of all the concerns for a cross-cutting incorporation of elements, where they may be useful, into a few general new-management recommendations for the digital applications ecosystem proposed as the most suitable and consistent with Barcelona City Council’s recently approved “Barcelona Digital Plan for 2017 – 2020 (Transition towards Technological Sovereignty)”, which are aimed at running the city’s digital positioning strategy towards a paradigm overcoming self-designation as a “smart city” so as to advance “towards an open, fair, circular and democratic city”.