Photo: Yummy Scummy by Zach Manchester - Some Rights Reserved
There's been quite a stir lately about the viability of the Web on mobile devices with various folks pronouncing it inferior especially in comparison with mobile applications.
Yesterday Malcolm Murphy at Mobile Industry Review blasted; "Can we all admit that ‘Mobile Web’ is total rubbish? " He pointed out that there's a huge gap in performance and usability between web apps in desktop browsers and those on phone. Specifically;
Malcolm claims mobile applications are the way to consume web services on phones. He says that he and the people he knows do 90% of their interaction with web based services using mobile applications like the Gmail app rather than a mobile browser.
While Malcolm grants that the iPhone delivers a superior experience, he dismisses it as a "niche" device and says that the popularity of Facebook and Twitter apps even on the iPhone further validates applications as the preferred delivery method. He admits that mobile browsers will get better but will always be inferior to desktop ones with the implication that the mobile browser will never be worth bothering with.
Malcolm's viewpoint was echoed in reports from the MobileBeat conference last week, where GeJar AppStore CEO Ilja Laurs was widely quoted as predicting that ""Apps will be as big if not bigger than the Internet"
I actually agree with Malcolm on many of these points. Mobile browsers are inferior to desktop browsers and probably always will be. Well designed mobile applications do generally perform better and give a superior user experience compared with their mobile browser based equivalents. However I strongly disagree with his (and Ilja's) conclusion that the majority of web use on phones will be with single purpose applications rather than web browsers.
Applications are important and will be increasingly popular with users. There are some types of services like navigation and mapping that will probably always be better as done an app. But it is the browser where the real growth in the consumption of cloud based data will occur. The reason is scalability. Apps are not scalable on a couple of levels.
First there is the scale of the web itself. There are millions of sites. Sure the average person visits only a few dozen sites with any regularity. But the web is built on hyperlinks. We use it by following links to other sites. I'd be willing to bet that by following links most web users visit at least a couple dozen new sites each week in addition to the two dozen they follow regularly. Users who are active on forums, Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites where link sharing is popular may visit a hundred different sites every week, thousands a year. Do all these sites have apps? Of course not and even if they did no one wants to install a separate app for every new site they visit.
The other scalability issue is the one faced by app builders. Mobile is very fragmented. Building and maintaining apps for every mobile smartphone OS and every subtly incompatible variant of Java ME is incredibly expensive. No want can afford to do that. Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra agrees saying at MobileBeat that even Google is "not rich enough" to build apps for all platforms. Gundotra believes that the future is browser based mobile apps. Even GetJar's Laurs seemed to agree with Gundotra on app development costs saying; "It is fashionable to do apps and every media outlet tells you apps are cool. ...But the economics are a different story. The ratio of those developers who will fail is about 90%..."
So getting back to Malcom's point that the web on mobiles is rubbish. Yes there are problems, the user experience is generally not very good. But everything that's wrong with the web on mobiles is fixable. And it's being fixed right now. There is a browser war going on between Apple, Google, Nokia and Opera that is driving the performance and usability of mobile browsers ever higher. Apple started the war by defining a new level
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posted by Dennis Bournique
July 21, 2009 @ 10:00 am
7 View Comments
