Laurent’s blog

Mobile apps should be web based, or should they?

A few days ago, I received this cartoon in Penrillian’s latest newsletter. It depicts pretty well my true feeling have about the current state of mobile web-based applications: they’re great except…

With the release of Android and the success of the iPhone as a mobile internet platform, questions about the application strategy becomes more frequent. We know the data is located on the cloud, but where should the application be?

A- On the device (native)
B- On the web (dedicated)
C- On the web (generic)

Everyone ask if they should be developing a native application such as an iPhone or Blackberry app, a platform specific web version (ex. iphone.myco.com) or generic mobile web version (ex. m.myco.com) of their service.

On one side, the native application is much closer to the platform in terms of look & speed but requires a download and need to be adapted to each platform. On the other side, the web-based application dedicated to a single platform is a more lightweight alternative and doesn’t require a download. Unfortunately the mobile network is far from being ubiquitous and the convenience of mobile web is not necessarily obvious. Especially if you consider that you still need a manipulation for a web application to own some real estate space on the user’s screen .

Answer: All of the above

Unfortunately, “all of the above” is too often the developers first answer. They provide a native app, a specific mobile version of the site and a generic one. If you take for example LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or many others applications, you will see that they experiment with the various ways to access their service on the same device.

The terrible drawback of this method is that each tool provides a different level of functionality. Users actually need the two, three of four applications to experience the same service as what can simply be done using the desktop’s browser.

It looks the same but not the same

Let’s take Facebook for example. The “Home” on the iPhone application only displays friends’ status messages. In order to view new friends and events on top of status messages, then accessing Facebook using the mobile version dedicated to the iPhone is possible. This version includes the latest stream including notifications, photos, events and everything else from the “regular” news feed.

As for pending requests, this cannot be done using iphone.facebook.com, only the generic mobile site m.facebook.com will allow to confirm friends and events. Unless you really wanted to add your friend to one of your Friend Lists, in that case you can only do it through the regular site www.facebook.com.

Our future

To the opposite of the desktop space where web applications are slowly taking over the installed software space, on the mobile device, the gap between native and mobile web is narrowing partially thanks to Apple’s App Store easing the distribution of native applications.

But for now, I still prefer a feature complete native application using plenty of network to get to the data over an average web application.

Even if ultimately services will consolidate their offering, it will not happen anytime soon as we will first see a proliferation of smaller applications (web and native) from the developers themselves along with applications from the community using the official APIs.

Let’s just hope that each one of them becomes more feature complete over time.

Update [a few minutes after posting this]

My wish has been granted as Facebook just released v2 of their native iphone application. They have included most of the missing features: full feeds, notifications and requests.