Mobile Web vs Applications/Widgets

IanFogg | February 28, 2008, 12:19 PM

Michael Mace nails it: mobile devices are different from PCs, the market for add-on software is stumbling, and has not been as great a success as most would like. (+ also see my footnote).

The issue for the handheld software industry now, is that the number of mobile platforms that developers must target is increasing. In the handheld world we are moving ever further away from the PC Internet model whereby a PC software developer can reach almost everyone with a single download, based on one piece of application development.

Apple's iPhone SDK announcement will further increase the number of mobile platforms that developers have to choose between when allocating their development dollars and Euros.

This is one of the many reasons that building mobile websites is attractive. They can work across different handheld devices. They are relatively cheap to build. They work within the familiar handheld UI of the handheld browser. With 3G, they are very quick to load. With bookmarks, users can navigate directly to specific information. Users are in control of what they want to access and when (unlike push mechanisms like SMS or MMS, or of many intrusive home screen applets).

The number of mobile platforms in the market now or soon is, and I'm sure I'm not listing all of them:
Nokia's Series 60.
UIQ
Windows Mobile Professional (v6) / Window Mobile 5 Pocket PC.
Windows Mobile Standard (v6) / Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone.
J2ME.
Brew.
Google Android.
Apple iPhone / iPod Touch (announcement due any day now on the SDK).
Palm OS.
Yahoo! Go Widgets.
Nokia Widsets.
Blackberry.
Nokia Internet Tablets (OS2008 vs OS2007 etc).

And, worse, within most of the above handset platforms, there are different versions of each platform which leads to issues for application developers. Plus, many users will have no idea what platform, precisely, is on their phone as the mobile industry chooses not to communicate those details, and so users have little clue about which applications will work on their phone model.

+ although as an ex-Psion'ite I'd question his assertion that we all believed even back in the 1990s that add-on software was so essential. We didn't. Even in 1993 with the Psion Series 3a launch, or even in the 1980s, everyone at Psion knew that delivering high quality standard built-in applications is critical for a handheld. That's the reason that every Psion, and every Palm for that matter, shipped with a suite of fully functional applications that met most users' needs most of the time.