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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Re: Declining attractiveness of native apps?
robin.jewsbury | 03/03/2008, 18:06
I see your point about native apps in 1998 (J2ME did not arrive until 2001). In 1998 the native apps were those been produced for phone manufacturers so not really relevant here.... perhaps the graph should have started in 2001.
But the point remains J2ME has disppointed in its fragmentation and other native app development (eg Symbian) has been too difficult.
The next step: HTTP server in the phone
jukkaekl | 04/03/2008, 10:26
This "hot topic" also seems relevant regarding our Mobile Web Server.
Web apps on the phone could then directly contact other phones, imagine the possibilities?
One idea that also might work:
http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/peep-an-open-twitter-server
Author Profile
Robin is co-founder of RefreshMobile Ltd which was Forum Nokia developer of the year for 2006/7. Refresh has developed a number of innovative products including Mobizines (a client providing magazines on phones), Eyemags (user generated magazines on phones) and most recently Mippin (which mobilises the web for Mobile in the browser). See this blog on your mobile at http://mippin.com/forumnokia
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Declining attractiveness of native apps?
mgroeber9110 | 03/03/2008, 10:13
I am not sure if the graph is entirely fair in showing the attractiveness of native apps actually declining (unless you are talking about "relative" attractiveness, compared to other options) - the fast growth of the installed base of platforms like Symbian should actually increase their appeal to developers massively.-
Certainly, the idea that writing native apps for mobile devices was actually *more* appealing in the days of the Nokia 9000 is not quite borne out by the number of people that were actually doing it - back in the days of the GEOS operating system I remember there being only a handful of us that actually even tried our hands at this...
Anyway, the argument probably makes sense even if you chart it with an increasing attractiveness, starting from a fairly low point, but with the slop for Web-based apps having become considerably steeper in 2007, with the advent of the S60 OSS browser and the iPhone.