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Web Apps vs Mobile Apps - the debates begins!

robin.jewsbury | 02 March, 2008 20:44

I was very interested to read Michael Mace's latest blog about the death of mobile apps, and Carlo Longino's similar blog also taking about the death of mobile native apps. 

Michael Mace shows this graph on his blog

We had this debate a year ago in our company and totally changed direction because of it - basically we stopped producing mobile apps a year ago and started producing a web only solution.  The concern was that we would not be able to create such a good user experience with the Web as we had achieved with our Mobile apps - afterall we had won several user experience awards for our applications.  This fear has not materialised; we put considerable effort into producing an excellent web experience.  Where we've really excelled is in our development cycles.  We've gone from a 3 month development cycle producing 14 different application variants (12 Java and 2 Symbian native variants) to a 3 week development cycle - we actually have more user experience variation than we used to coping with difference screen sizes and device capabilities but the development is so much easier and so much faster. 

Admittedly our application is ideal for rendering in a browser, but other application developers should also consider a move to web experience too.  Afterall the same happened with the fixed internet in the 90s.  In the beginnings of the Internet many applications were produced; my first experience with Internet shopping with Tesco was using an application which required a huge installation including a local database install.  It worked fine for the early adopter (me), but when they wanted to make it a consumer experience they came up with a brick wall - it was called installation (too many things could go wrong and did).  The same is true of mobile applications today - installation is too big a hurdle for the average consumer.... it needs to be just a click away.

The mobile browser is getting better day by day and can now do many of those things only applications could do in the past - its only going to continue getting easier in the browser.

 

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