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Mobile shift: You’ve probably underestimated just how big this is

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Re: Mobile shift: You’ve probably underestimated just how big this is

#3

Post by ryandvm »

I find this trend disturbing. This is essentially the opposite of what happened in the 90s during the mass migration from curated networking experiences like AOL and CompuServe towards the unfettered Internet. Now, people are willingly eschewing the open web in favor of, in the case of iOS, walled gardens. And unless this is reversed, it portends a dismal future for the Internet.

Re: Mobile shift: You’ve probably underestimated just how big this is

#5

Post by amirnathoo »

ryandvm wrote: post #3

I find this trend disturbing. This is essentially the opposite of what happened in the 90s during the mass migration from curated networking experiences like AOL and CompuServe towards the unfettered Internet. Now, people are willingly eschewing the open web in favor of, in the case of iOS, walled gardens. And unless this is reversed, it portends a dismal future for the Internet.

I'm more optimistic - Apple doesn't have a monopoly on the software stack like Microsoft did with Windows.

Competition between Android, iOS and Windows Phone already seems to be spurring a race towards openness.

Re: Mobile shift: You’ve probably underestimated just how big this is

#6

Post by mindstab »

ryandvm wrote: post #3

I find this trend disturbing. This is essentially the opposite of what happened in the 90s during the mass migration from curated networking experiences like AOL and CompuServe towards the unfettered Internet. Now, people are willingly eschewing the open web in favor of, in the case of iOS, walled gardens. And unless this is reversed, it portends a dismal future for the Internet.

We're still trying to find the balance of local and cloud. Desktop apps were great in the 90s because they leverage the local machine's speed and hardware (there weren't any mp3 or jukebox webapps in the 90s, games etc).

But as the browser and web got more powerful and we started moving around more and having more computers (work, laptop, home) the centrality of "the cloud" because a selling point and for many applications the "local power" of the desktop was less important.

Now however we're seeing new constraints play a role.

On mobile, again power in some cases is a bit limited, we have more data/sensors to play with and HTML hasn't caught up to complicated swipe interfaces too well yet. We have location and accelerometer sensors that haven't been too well integrated yet. And your phone is always with you. So we're seeing a swing to cloud data back local apps again. The 3 mobile apps I use the most are google reader (the new site layout is space wasteful in a browser on my netbook, good luck having fun reading on a mobile browser), a movie player and a music player. On my desktop I'm just as likely to use grooveshark or some other streaming service, but with still expensive mobile bandwidth having "locally cached" mp3s wins out over streaming.

If we want to move this back all onto the web, we need an html6 that supports swipe, mobile app like layout, local storage (I know, html5 draft kinda has this... ish)

It's all about device constraints and what is available.

This is just a signal we need to develop the browser some more if we again want it to be the platform of choice in this new space.

Re: Mobile shift: You’ve probably underestimated just how big this is

#7

Post by huggyface »

ryandvm wrote: post #3

I find this trend disturbing. This is essentially the opposite of what happened in the 90s during the mass migration from curated networking experiences like AOL and CompuServe towards the unfettered Internet. Now, people are willingly eschewing the open web in favor of, in the case of iOS, walled gardens. And unless this is reversed, it portends a dismal future for the Internet.

I suspect that many of those minutes are playing Angry Birds or minesweeper. While it might cut into Facebook gaming time, I don't think it really is competition for what most of us see the web as providing.

It really is all very temporary anyways. Native apps took off because the web wasn't ready for mobile (most sites were horrendous, etc). I am finding more and more sites offering up excellent mobile experiences that rival or exceed what their parallel native apps offer. Just a few stories away from this the fogcreek crew say "Apps provide things we can’t get out of the web: better speed, offline support, smooth animations, push notifications, and a native look and feel". Of those the only item that legitimately is an advantage of native apps is look and feel.

Re: Mobile shift: You’ve probably underestimated just how big this is

#9

Post by joe_fishfish »

Why does it have to be apps?

The web experience on mobile devices is improving all the time. With all major smartphone platforms now sporting WebKit browsers, CSS3 media queries and HTML5 are widely supported in the mobile space. That enables us to create sites with one markup that function well for all screen sizes.

There isn't as much pizazz on the web as can be done with apps, but given the expense of effectively writing the same app three times (one for web, one for Android, one for iOS) responsive techniques in web design can make the web option a lot more cost effective than the alternative.

Re: Mobile shift: You’ve probably underestimated just how big this is

#10

Post by BlazingFrog »

Comparing "web sites" at large to "mobile apps" is an unfair comparison. In addition to being able to get online through native mobile apps, smart phones also count for page views on regular sites as much as any desktop does. Also, most serious web app programmers out there also have a mobile version of their web site available, so I don't buy the whole give-up-on-standard-web-apps-and-go-for-native-mobile-apps argument. However, no one can deny the strong trend toward mobile computing.
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