Taptu, the mobile search solution, has been keeping an eye on the mobile web — specifically what they’re calling the mobile touch web, which I guess is slightly different from the non-touch mobile web — and has produced a fairly comprehensive report of their findings. Of particular interest is the fact that “there are a higher proportion of shopping and services sites on the mobile touch Web (20%) compared to Apple’s App Store (3.6%).” According to Taptu, this is because “the mobile touch Web provides the opportunity for direct-to-consumer billing.”
I think it goes beyond just the direct-to-consumer billing convenience, though. You can spend your time and energy and precious development resources to build a terrific platform-specific application, only to sit in frustration as it languishes in some opaque approval process. And then you get to do it all over again on the other major platforms, increasing your development costs and complexity. Or you can spend your time and energy and precious development resources making a terrific mobile-optimized view into your existing web presence. The latter choice allows you to target and receive visits from multiple mobile devices, both current and those in the works. It also allows you to push out updates that are immediately enjoyed by all your users, without requiring them to download the updated app to their device.
My buddy Chris recently decided to write a mobile-friendly admin plugin for the blogging software he uses, rather than try to write a dedicated iPhone app. As he points out, “this plugin works on iPhone, iPod Touch, the Palm webOS and Android phones.” And it’s something that’s available for use now, without any approval delay.
I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to create what amounts to an alternate mobile admin as a native app. There is very little, if anything, to be gained from doing that. On the contrary there is much more to gain by making something like this into a well designed web app.
I think Chris is on to something; and I think we’ll see a pretty healthy adoption of touch mobile web sites as our devices continue to mature.
I totally agree. In fact, it’s why just yesterday we launched the ability to have your mobile web app added to our site, AppStoreHQ:
http://blog.appstorehq.com/post/367758335/html5-or-native-apps-either-way-weve-got-you
The mobile web will be a Big Deal and we’re going to be there to help users discover the best apps and help developers promote those apps.
Also, I recently launched http://www.mobilehtml5.com — a tumblog of various mobile web/HTML5 related links. If you’re a developer, check it out and let me know what you think.
I agree, mobile web-apps teamed with html5 are the future not the apps.
Sure, mobile web/HTML5 may be the way, but I don’t think that should preclude sites/developers from focusing on that element *first*, then a native app for specific devices. Not being a mobile developer, it may sound easier than it actually is. If I could use an iPhone app to do something specific with a service, vs using the mobile browser I would, even if the app really is just a shell mobile browser wrapping up the existing HTML5 functionality with a few extra bells and whistles.
Much of the move to web apps for mobile is the result of the complexity of supporting the various mobile platforms. HTML5 may become the answer, but it’s missing some components that would make it the defacto standard. These deficiencies include security, application management, and user experience. While the dev effort and resources are lower than native, what happens when I want to take advantage of the camera on the device or an external Bluetooth device? In many cases I cannot leverage those functions. For fairly static consumer content type applications, these shortcomings are many times not an issue. In the world of data rich, highly dynamic applications that are integrated to one or many backends the model falls down. While the promise of HTML5 also is great for cross-device/cross-platform purposes today only the iPhone and Android include the support for it. Antenna recommends that anyone looking into enterprise or B2B2C apps really consider their vision of what they want to deliver for mobile. The days of just putting an app out there for market presence no longer gains a company anything. The app has to have value, provide services and be a great user experience whether in or out of data coverage.
Anyone interested in developing apps should also check out http://www.att.com/sdk
Building separate apps for separate platforms is, indeed, expensive and time-consuming.
A better way…
…use the the web-based studio environment at Whoop (www.whoop.com) to develop a single app that runs in a native way on multiple different platforms. Yes, you read that correctly. Produce once, publish to multiple platforms with one click of the mouse. Let me know if you’d like a demo.
It’s interesting to watch some clarity come into the general discussion about the pros and cons of each instead of the typical us vs. them – style discussions about mobile web vs. native app. Soon enough the growth of web apps will become more noticeable to average users and it will dawn on people that there are appropriate use cases for both platforms, and those variables will be better defined.
– Jon
movitas.com
Totally agree. and more to it, I would not be surprised the majority of the apps to disappear within 5 years or so..
I do agree. The core reason for using native apps at all is that fact that web app technologies still cannot deliver a really sleek user-interfaces and cannot access native device capabilities such as GPS data, address book, etc…
And all this gradually changes with HTML5 being an important step in the process. More thoughts in that direction: http://www.bianor.com/blog/the-future-of-mobile-application-development-web-or-native/
Curios to know what will be the future role of app stores if the majority of apps become web-based…
- Kosta
bianor.com
наилучший сантехник киев только здесь
Totally agree. and more to it, I would not be surprised the majority of the apps to disappear within 5 years or so..
Curios to know what will be the future role of app stores if the majority of apps become web-based…