I've been thinking mobile allot lately. And I keep thinking we are seeing a cycle of trends of past days. Maybe this is just history repeating itself.
At Macadamian we have many customers asking us Native vs Web for mobile apps. And right now, no question native offers a much richer experience. But this sounds like the exact same argument that was used for desktop vs web apps circa 1999. But the web slowly chipped away at native. Ease of upgrade, cross platform (yes even with the NN, IE, Firefox, Safari, etc... browser CSS/JavaScript incompatibilities), single development stack all beat the native argument. Will it happen again?
I think so... However, maybe not as explicit as we've seen in the past. There is talk of 'hybrid' mobile apps. We are seeing these in the form of explicit embedded browser controls inside a native application. This solves the distribution problem of the application (note: this still upsets people who paid for the application strangely enough, though they are fine to pay for a native front end that consumes the same data and has the same laggy interface) which helps companies understand distribution and monatization. We are also seeing this in cross platform development tools like Titanium, PhoneGap etc... These are very cool development environments that lean very heavily on JavaScript and browser controls while providing the necessary hardware hooks that native applications get (location, microphone, gyroscope etc...)
But really these are just fancy web applications, wrapped in pretty wrapping paper and distributed as 'apps' to the mass market. So does that mean the web app was just re-invented for the mobile platform and has already started it's climb to winning this battle again (this by no means the death of local apps)? Time will tell.
No comments:
Post a Comment