Today I use a ton of applications on my iPhone to get the full experience of online services/sites like Facebook, Amazon, LinkedIn, Wikipedia and others. But the beauty of the web (at least on the PC) is that you don’t need to download software in most cases to get a full, awesome experience. I can just log into eBay and start trading stuff; I don’t have to wait for a download to get going.
But on the mobile phone it’s different. To get the best experience I need to hit the app store and download something. It’s a like a weird step backwards from the point where anyone could easily use any site with a browser (from your PC) without downloading software to a place where each site has its own special software that requires a download and install.
According to MediaPost:
Gartner estimates the combined installed base of smartphones and browser-equipped enhanced phones will surpass 1.82 billion units by 2013, eclipsing the total of 1.78 billion PCs by then.
But the firm warns that many sites still are not optimized for the mobile Web, even though cell users expect to make fewer clicks on their phones than on a PC. To successfully expand into mobile, publishers will have to reformat sites from the small form-factor of handheld devices.
I totally buy this argument. While one can quibble around the exact number of mobile devices vs. PCs, there is a clear and obvious trend that mobile devices are becoming an important secondary, and to a lot of people, the primary web access device.
So I wonder – will web sites just automatically be optimized for mobile viewing, or will the “app” become even more important? Is this whole app thing for using online services a real of “de-evolution” of the web – or a mere blip before mobile browsers and bandwidth become powerful enough to support the real web experience? What do people think, are mobile web apps here to say or just a strange passing fancy?
January 15th, 2010 at 4:53 am
I would say most applications that we see nowadays will reach a point where they can run straight from our mobile browsers and the development of HTML 5 fully supports this claim. We are already running applications like game applications, Google Docs, GMail, Maps, Remember The Milk, etc. from our web browsers. The performance of these apps on web browsers will be improved with HTML 5, to allow incorporation of features like better multimedia experience, offline access, etc. and it should be hitting mobile phones pretty soon.
Seeing mobile platforms (Apple, Blackberry, Android, etc) going away in the near future is a realistic prediction too because as soon as applications can be loaded in a mobile browser, which is currently available in most phones, consumers and users will no longer need to go through the loop of app stores and of course, the well debated moderation imposed by these platforms.
Feel free to check out http://www.wayneliew.com/10-mobile-application-de… for mobile applications development trends expected to happen in 2010.
January 15th, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Wayne,
That is an awesome post. I am going to bookmark it and think about some of your conclusions.
I was speaking with a local VC yesterday at lunch, and he pointed out that the mobile screen is another draw-back to the mobile experience, beyond bandwidth and whatnot. So, I guess mobile experiences will always have to be a bit different than a "big" monitor experience. However, this doesn't mean that the browser can't run the application vs. a downloaded application – it just means that the site will have to be able to detect the browser and adjust appropriately.
I'm not sure the platforms will go away in the "near" term, but in the long term anything is possible.
January 17th, 2010 at 2:00 am
It's amazing how connected we are today thanks to all the developing technologies. Great time that we're living in. Yeah, I still prefer the big monitor experience anytime. Perhaps the tablet might change things but for now, I still love my laptop.
January 18th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
Great post. I think it surely will be both. You have desktop apps that cannot do things that web apps do. And then you have mobile apps that do things that desktops cannot do. I think it will be the same for the mobile. There will be apps that you can use via your browser. Then there will be apps that will be used natively.
The browser has the inherent disadvantage of not being able to leverage many of the mobile phones features (at least today). Many features might open up to the browser, but many won't because of security concerns. You do not want your location to be open to pretty much any website. Higher end gaming has never been a browser thing.
Then there are apps that are used infrequently and do not require many of the features and processing power of the phone (banking, email, light weight document editing). These are the apps that will probably fall in the browser league.
However, predicting is hazardous. The mobile space throws up so many different paradigms around portability, location, interaction that predicting the future would not be for the faint hearted. You can never know what is around the corner.