Last week at Mobile World Congress Google announced that their mindset has changed from desktop to mobile. From now on they’ll always develop a mobile version first and only then the desktop version. This is big news as Google has brought several Internet services to the market with big impact. In a way, this is coming to an age story for mobile. That’s by no means a surprise. In 2010, 3G penetration will reach 20 % meaning over 1 billion users (for statistics, see Morgan Stanley’s report).
This tells not just about the critical mass of mobile Internet devices but also about mobile platforms being excellent testbeds. Development environments for most of the major mobile platforms are easy to set-up and application development is no longer as painful as it was some years ago with all the handset specific conversions. For mobile you can also develop only one portion of the desktop app -perhaps your most promising feature and gather feedback.
Let’s take an example as if you were developing software to help knowledge workers to manage their time and to allocate their time to different tasks. Some of the features could be i) setting a timer when starting a specific task or a customer project ii) making reports of time consumption at different intervals iii) sharing time consumption with co-workers. With traditional desktop development you’d have to pretty much develop the whole thing, polish the UI and develop back-end to a quite mature state. What if the service would not be attractive? Starting on mobile you could first release just the timer feature. Mobile interface wouldn’t require that much of design work and back-end would be quite simple at this stage. Given that you could find users for your mobile application you’d get tons of feedback on one of your most critical feature without jeopardizing the whole thing.
So mobile can be seen as the testbed. However, there are some shortcomings as well. First of all, the end-user discovery. With all the Appstores and Android Markets you can make your app available. But you’ll compete with 1000s of other apps and it can be very tricky to get some visibility in the application catalogue. Secondly, there’s no one-size-fits-all mobile development environment. iPhone environment is very well defined and documented, but Apple’s sandlot is very restricted and there’s tons of things you can’t do. Android seems to be very promising environment and Google is pretty much taking all kind of content to their catalogues. Nokia has the largest device penetration but Ovi store accepts applications only from companies and the development environments for Nokia platforms are still quite challenging. “So choose wisely, for while the true Grail will bring you life, the false Grail will take it from you.”
Google’s announcement also signals one thing that any developer should take into an account: no matter what you do you can’t forget mobile. With more and more mobile Internet users it just doesn’t make sense to neglect mobile users. Options are many, depending on the application:
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- desktop free, mobile premium: this seems to be the approach for some social networking services. Makes only sense if people are absolutely desperate to access the service on mobile.
- desktop premium, mobile premium: sweet spot.
- desktop premium, mobile free: several information services provide mobile for free with desktop subscription. Also Webex has a free mobile client for subscribers. However, these are mostly sold with desktop and mobile is thrown as a bonus. It’d be interesting to see more applications where mobile is the carrot and up-sell happens on desktop
- desktop free, mobile free: well, you better have millions of subscribers with a habit of clicking on your banners.
Juhana & Matti
True that mobile is going to be the flavor of the decade.
Very good read for mobile enthusiasts!
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Hi Katy,
Thanks for your comment. Sometimes it’s shocking to see how long it takes for new concepts to be widely adapted. I remember being involved with first WAP sites in 1999. It has taken more than a decade to combine the user experience, technology and a business model for the entire ecosystem.
Mobile vs. desktop might be a red herring. As apps move to the web, there is no “mobile web” or a “desktop web” just like there won’t be the “Android web” or the “iPhone web”. There is just “the web”.
What’s happening right now with companies (WSJ, Wired, NY Times, CNN etc.) creating custom versions of their content for specific devices like iPad or iPhone with platform-specific proprietary technologies is total craziness. We don’t need a “WSJ iPhone app”. We need a WSJ website that works across devices – including mobile – and doesn’t ignorantly discriminate against particular user groups or market segments.
The whole idea of platform-specific content in absolute conflict with the nature of the web and everything that made it successful. I predict we’ll look back at it some years from now shaking our heads at the insanity when we talked about “iPhone apps” or “Android apps” or “Nokia apps” instead of just “apps”. And that’s even more the case when it comes to content (such as a newspaper), for which writing an “app” is an entirely wrong approach.
There is no good reason why WSJ or Wired, for example, could not write their iPad content in HTML 5, make it interactive using JavaScript, using CSS3 to do animations, fancy 3D rotations and effects, include video in a perfectly standard and cross-platform way, and what not.
Betting against “open” and “standard” is not a good idea.
Excellent comment Peppe! E.g. Apple is creating more and more “walled garden” every day with iPhone and iPad, keeping Flash out etc. I guess that if you feel strong enough you can go your own way. I like Nokia’s Meego decision. Does it also mean that the content system will be open?