
Mobile shift: You’ve probably underestimated just how big this is - amirnathoo
https://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development-blog/2012/01/24/youve-probably-underestimated-just-how-big-this-is/
======
ender7
Two things:

1\. The author of this article clearly has money on one side of the issue
since he's trying to sell a cross-device app development platform.

2\. The data he supplies isn't broken down by usage type, so it's a little
hard to analyze. What if 50% of the 'app' time is spent playing games? Or 20%
of it is spent only in a couple of apps like Facebook? He's suggesting that
native apps are supplanting web usage, but the graph actually shows web usage
going _up_. So, are apps complementing or cannibalizing web usage? Hard to
tell.

~~~
diminish
I understand that some people like TV/Radio metrics; such as time spent;
however web sites/mobile apps are programmable with multiple purposes where
each have diverse usage scenarios than passively watching TV.

Comparing Minutes spent on apps or web sites may be a bit misleading; in this
case why not put time spend on Office suites or Desktops on PCs too or me
watching my Lisp code. Apps such as games, contents, utilities or web front
ends have all different meanings to the users and with regard to monetization
(ad or not). The same is true for web sites.

a. the time I spend with my utility apps are apples and oranges comparison to
the time I spend reading HN on my Android.

b. Not all 'times spend` are monetizable, or monetizable in the same rate or
way;

c. Mobile apps are used slower mainly due to small screen size, finger input.

d. Games are a peculiar category on their own.

Edit: that said; mobile has expanded our connected time to new places/times;
toilet, elevator, waiting (queues), couch, TV-ad pauses...

------
pg
One of the first signs I noticed of this was startups we funded not caring
much what their domain name was. IIRC that trend began about a year to 18
months ago.

~~~
jbail
I wonder how mobile web fits into this. Sure, native apps are great, but I'd
much prefer to not need to switch between a bunch of native apps and just use
my phone's web browser.

Mobile web apps like Facebook prove that you can build a non-trivial app that
runs in a web browser and have the experience be so good that people don't
even care about the native app version (at least everyone I know just uses
Facebook right from their mobile web browser).

A good domain name is still valuable. This is more true especially as more
access to phone hardware gets opened up to JavaScript APIs right from the
browser. You just can't beat making a change to your app on your server and
having all your users get new versions the next time they visit. It's way
better than waiting weeks for Apple to review and approve your changes.

~~~
bignoggins
I've seen the opposite. Almost everyone I know uses the native facebook app
versus going to m.facebook.com. Most people only use a few websites/apps on
their phones, and I think it's just simpler to tap on the app icon rather than
start up mobile safari and type m.facebook.com.

~~~
djb_hackernews
The "native" facebook app is just an html5 webapp believe it or not.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
I have no trouble believing it, which is a big part of why it has such
terrible ratings and reviews now, as compared to when it was native.

And from what I understand, Facebook has done a lot of significant engineering
to try and improve the performance while keeping it mostly HTML5.

Mobile web apps aren't ready.

~~~
lazerwalker
The FB app was heavily using webviews long before the most recent redesign. I
could be wrong, but if I remember correctly it was even mostly web-based back
when Joe Hewitt was still working on it, and he left Facebook in 2009.

------
danso
> _I met a team at a mobile dev shop a couple of weeks ago and in the
> discussion I casually mentioned that mobile app usage exceeds web usage._

I have to question this assertion made in the very first sentence...it does
not pass the bullshit test and it's hard for me to trust anything else in this
post unless this assertion is proven in detail.

And by "in detail," I mean that this metric is useless unless broken up by
category. Is it possible that Facebook mobile app usage is more than Facebook
standard-browser usage? Possibly. What about for news sites? I would say, no
way. It seems that many of us at HN, even the productive ones, spend a chunk
of the work day browsing. Imagine how much the average white-collar worker
spends idling away.

Also, how much of the mobile app usage includes freemium/MMORPG/spec-intensive
games? This is a category that many web services will never try to compete in?

\--

FWIW, here is the site that the OP links to to justify this assertion:
[http://blog.flurry.com/bid/63907/Mobile-Apps-Put-the-Web-
in-...](http://blog.flurry.com/bid/63907/Mobile-Apps-Put-the-Web-in-Their-
Rear-view-Mirror)

And this is what that site says: > __In this report, Flurry compares how daily
interactive consumption has changed over the last 12 months between the web
(both desktop and mobile web) and mobile native apps. For Internet
consumption, we built a model using publicly available data from comScore and
Alexa. For mobile application usage, we used Flurry Analytics data, now
exceeding 500 million aggregated, anonymous use sessions per day across more
than 85,000 applications. We estimate this accounts for approximately one
third of all mobile application activity, which we scaled-up accordingly for
this analysis. __

Ah, a "model using publicly available data from comScore and Alexa"...right,
that sounds like a totally reliable blackbox to base a completely game-
changing assertion.

------
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.

~~~
mindstab
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.

~~~
rhizome
_We're still trying to find the balance of local and cloud._

History tells us that this "balance" is a mirage. It's a see-saw with a
foundation based on thick vs. thin clients, i.e. where the horsepower is
located.

~~~
gwern
I always liked the metaphor of the 'wheel of reincarnation' from 1968 (!):
<http://www.cap-lore.com/Hardware/Wheel.html> (Read the linked PDF paper,
better than the HTML summary.)

------
kmfrk
People who are surprised about the time spent on mobile devices have obviously
never been in a waiting room nor public transportation.

Since the iPhone, people have had a chance to kill "dead time" which would
otherwise have been spent staring into walls and windows. Twitter's
microblogging and -communication, of course, has exacerbated this where we see
celebrities who tweet when there is downtime on the set where they are
shooting.

I think it's completely ridiculous to say that this is something particular to
mobile apps rather than mobile proper.

------
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.

------
chaz
There's one caveat to this report that's important: the data is about two
different sets of users. The web data is from comScore, and measures all US
web users. It includes everyone from HN readers to the neighbor that checks
email just once a month. The mobile data is only looking at US smartphone
users (who own a phone that can run apps that Flurry can track), and excludes
feature phone users or people with no mobile phone at all. Assuming high
smartphone usage correlates to high web usage, web data looks comparatively
low.

------
jonstjohn
Personally, I find most native apps to be much better designed for mobile
devices than mobile websites. I know this is changing with newer web
technologies, but the reality is that the mobile device provides a completely
different set of options that mobile web will have a hard time catching up on.
I'm thinking about things related to the hardware, such as near-field
communication - or things related to processes that are not running inside the
browser, e.g., push notifications.

To me, the possibilities with a mobile device are far greater than what lives
within the browser. As much as I love the open standards of the web, and have
become a software develop in their midst, there is something that really
inspires the imagination about mobile devices that goes beyond the browser.

------
jarrett
This is probably true for companies targeting casual users. Facebook and
YouTube are great examples.

But I can't see people switching to mobile for the bulk of their serious,
work-oriented computing unless the hardware experience drastically changes. I
would never program on an iPhone or iPad if a computer were available. Nor
would I want to do serious video editing, or CAD. I probably wouldn't even
want to type a book on an iPad unless I had an external keyboard and mouse--
and at that point, how different is it from a laptop?

Granted, most of these use cases can't be done on the web today. But that may
(or may not) change. And even now, there are professional tasks that I'd much
prefer to do on a laptop or desktop than on a mobile device--for example,
updating Basecamp to-dos.

I also wonder whether this mobile vs web distinction will persist in the long
run. Imagine a future where the most popular way to access Facebook is by
clicking an icon on your iPad, which launches a Facebook mobile version in
Safari or a very thin native app built around UIWebView. Is this mobile, or is
this the web? At that point, I think the distinction becomes meaningless.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Few people who use computers for work require the same degree of capability as
programmers do. For most office work there are huge reasons why the mobile
paradigm makes a ton of sense. I firmly believe that in 10-20 years it will be
the dominant form of business computer.

That doesn't mean you can't use a mouse and keyboard as well. And that does
make it similar to the form-factor of a laptop or a desktop but that misses
the core advantages of tablet computers. The OS experience, the app. install
and management experience, the portability advantages (tablets are vastly more
portable than even a laptop), and the potential cost savings. Not to mention
that it could easily be a different set of companies providing such systems in
the future than the PC stalwarts of today (perhaps google, apple, samsung, and
HTC instead of Microsoft, dell, and hp).

~~~
jarrett
So in other words, mouse + keyboard + iOS/Android will become the dominant
system for everyday office use, such as word processing and writings emails? I
can believe that.

As you said, the fundamental difference at that point between mobile and
traditional computers is the OS. But if that's the case, then I have to
question how relevant the distinction is from a developer's point of view.

To cater to mouse + keyboard + iOS/Android users, we don't need to build
native iOS apps. We can just as well build regular old web apps and ensure
they work well for mouse + keyboard + iOS/Android. That's not very different
from what we do today, except for the fact that we'd have to account for yet
another set of screen sizes.

Therefore, as far as serious/business/professional apps are concerned, I don't
foresee a major paradigm shift. More like a pressure to learn some new web dev
techniques, such as responsive design.

Again, though, I don't claim this would hold true for consumer apps. Many of
those will likely be used from an iPhone or an iPad without any external
devices.

~~~
andrewflnr
What I think will be even cooler is tablet + keyboard + motion sensing field.
If the gestures were designed right, you probably wouldn't even have to move
far off the keyboard to get that nice, free-form, analog input. Now that I
think about it, that would be pretty cool on my desktop, too.

------
agscala
While I think the idea of this article is true, I think it's a bit unfair to
compare the number of mobile apps to the number of web sites. Yes, there may
be 350 million websites, but how many of those actually offer a valuable
service? I think that the number of worthwhile websites is easily less than
400k. Same with the phone app market: there may be 400k apps, but most are
crap. Honestly, I think that the web and mobile probably hover pretty close to
each other in terms of the number of useful applications.

~~~
amirnathoo
Yes, this isn't exactly a comprehensive study, I just looked up some ballpark
figures to get an idea and was really surprised by just how big the diff was
between where consumer attention vs developer attention seemed to be.

I'm not sure it makes sense to think of it in terms of number of 'useful'
website vs mobile apps today by some definition of 'useful' though. Even if
you expect the ratio of useful / not-useful to decline at 40M Android apps vs
400K you'd still expect that most of the top useful 100 apps in 3 years' time
haven't been conceived yet and will be very different from today's.

------
jasonkolb
I just had another thought on this: mobile usage does not necessarily imply
that the back-end is entirely on the device as well.

For example, the app I'm building right now has an entirely iOS-based UI, but
the brains are hosted on the public Web via API. The app talks to the back-end
via Websockets for anything that requires brains.

This type of architecture allows your application to participate in the UI-du-
jour (native apps) while at the same time participating in the open Web. And
you can simply write another client when another type of device (I dunno,
Kinect?) becomes the consumer's preferred method of consuming. I think it will
become much more popular in the coming years.

------
jarcoal
As a web developer is pains me to say this, but I think that this is a good
thing. The web moves so slowly; it will never keep up with native apps.

Some people are definitely concerned this leaves us in a less open world, but
IMO, we'll be just fine. The most important part to have open is the
data/logic layer, and that has happened through the explosion of APIs.

------
b1tr0t
I freely admit I'm on the web side of this issue.

No question that apps are big. But there's a lot of data out there that people
regularly used less than 10 apps in the last 30 days. Almost all of those are
social or built-in apps. They used a lot more than 10 websites in the past 30
days.

The raw number of apps and websites available is a complete red herring.
Mobile apps have existed (in a numerically significant form) for < 4 years.
The web is closer to 20. Expect the amount of noise in the app space to follow
a similar growth curve except to date app discovery is worse. With the control
vendors have over app store environments, this may get even worse and not
better. Or it might get a lot better. Who knows. One thing is for sure -- if
you want to be found right now, you're better off with a good web site.

We discussed this a while back in a blog post based on other data from Flurry.
Also discussed by Skyfire.

Mobify post: [http://blog.mobify.com/2011/06/23/have-apps-really-passed-
mo...](http://blog.mobify.com/2011/06/23/have-apps-really-passed-mobile-web-
not-really/)

Skyfire post: [http://www.businessinsider.com/why-flurry-got-it-wrong-on-
ap...](http://www.businessinsider.com/why-flurry-got-it-wrong-on-apps-v-
browsers-2011-6)

Ed: fixed link.

------
ozataman
It is true that mobile usage is going through the roof and there is no doubt
there is a legitimate gold rush happening right now.

Nevertheless, I would like to raise a few points/questions with the reasoning
in this analysis, somewhat in defense of the web:

1\. Mobile apps provide a different mix of functionality when compared to the
web (particularly on our PCs). Quite a few mobile apps are simply games,
various time no-value-add time sinks and other similar non-connected
activities. Hence, I am unsure about the merit of comparing 60 minutes inside
of a web browser to 60 minutes on a mobile app. (On the other hand, perhaps
facebook usage more than compensates for all this)

2\. One reason mobile usage is so high is that our smartphones are always with
us and many of us chronically play with them when we have more than a 15
second pause. Again, I am unsure about the "quality" of the interaction during
these times.

3\. It seems that many mobile apps - the huge hits notwithstanding - solve
small, yet meaningful problems in a cool way. This is great, but it eventually
yields a lackluster impact - both financially and in terms of the effect on
society - and it makes for a real tough proposition to develop mobile apps as
a team (read multiple people) and expect to sustainably "grow" a business.
Yes, the barren solution space is huge, but the bang for the time spent is
also smaller on average. In contrast, the web now provides really large
flexibility in solving a range of problems at various depths.

4\. It also seems that several impressive startups are leveraging the mobile
platform as an add-on to their web-based presence, another channel to solve
problems on or a value enhancer to the tech. There is 0 doubt in my mind that
mobile is here to grow in this sense.

All in all, applications that leverage mobile have a large empty space to
fill. However, people should not just jump into mobile because it seems to be
the "rage".

------
antoinevg
Remember a time when someone talking about the Internet wasn't necessarily
talking about the World Wide Web?

Fifteen years ago we were bitching about all the startups abandoning 16 bits
worth of open and unfettered TCP port address space for the walled gardens of
port 80 and this new-fangled HTTP protocol.

Viva la (r)evoluzione!

------
Tossrock
This is a pretty bold premise; I think mobile web consumption probably
represents a pretty large fraction of those minutes. Having a web app that
works well both for desktop and mobile seems more important than a native
mobile app, to me.

~~~
brador
If they included games in that then I'd say over 90% of that "mobile app use"
time block is games or facebook for non-tech users. Games are better made as
native apps due to audio issues and facebook is facebook. Hence, the articles
dataset needs clarification before a firm conclusion can be made..

------
alecr
Once mobile web browsers have access to most of the APIs that native apps have
access to, and they have good offline functionality, developing a web app over
a native app will be a no-brainer

------
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.

~~~
amirnathoo
I don't think it's about giving up on standards in favor of native in an
either-or kind of way.

If you're building an app nowadays, ideally you'd have a web, mobile web, iOS
and Android version at launch. Because you want distribution and need to go
where your users are.

Thing is, the web is very crowded so it's hard to get attention whereas
relatively, it's still wide open when it comes to the native app galleries.

------
njharman
Yeah and you've underestimated how much mobile web apps will dominate. There
will always be native apps, but their percentage of total mobile apps will
dwindle. Many, many apps require nothing more than what webkit offers today. A
couple years or less of hardware performance increases will push us past the
inflection point.

But the main driver will be supply. There just are'nt enough Android, iOS
developers. Web devs are legion.

And no cross-device solution will be able to keep pace with webkit & HTML/CSS.

------
prbuckley
I bet 80% of web minutes are spent on facebook or google(gmail in
particular),that means 20% of minutes left for the remaining 345,999,998 other
sites on the web.

------
ThomPete
I think it's important to keep something straight here.

If you are going for the consumer market and some parts of the B2B market then
yes mobile will keep advancing.

But you aren't going to do the design, programming, your taxes or any other
labor intensive work or creation on your mobile.

So yes we probably underestimate it, but if we believe in that, then we are
most probably also underestimating how much both desktop apps and web apps are
going to matter many years ahead of us.

~~~
shareme
You assume of course that there will never be a device powerful enough to
match desktop.

Should I remind you that the chip in the that SIm card is in fact the same cpu
chip that was used in Apple IIs?

In next ten years you will see design,programming, etc done on tablets

~~~
swalsh
I think a large part of it is also form factor. My phone could have the power
of 3 super computers, but i'd still choose my laptop over it. I prefer a
larger screen, and a real keyboard.

For a mobile device to replace my desktop/laptop user interfaces + form
factors are going to need some rapid advances.

~~~
cluda01
Foldable keyboards and dirt cheap projection technologies could mitigate the
form factor issues. How about holographic displays? Or huds?

~~~
ThomPete
Sure, but not anytime soon.

------
pothibo
I think this is misleading.

It's true that there's a mobile shift in _startup_. Most startups want to hit
the mobile goldmine and become the next [enter a company here]. However, we
fail to understand that those important minutes spent are spent on either
games, which are consumed in matter of days (There's not many games that
sustain growth for over a period of a few months), and services that, for the
most part, already had a web presence.

Here's my rationale: If your startup/internet service company wants to be
successful, it will have to have a mobile presence, if it doesn't, opportunity
from competitor will arise and you might get into trouble.

However, considering the cost of a native mobile app (iOS or Android), I
wouldn't be surprised if within 2-3 years, startup would go back to focus on
web first and if traction occurs, expanding to the mobile area (Except for
startup that leverage the mobile hardware, ie camera, geo-location, etc)

~~~
pothibo
Also, for all those minutes used, how many of them are used by Facebook, Maps,
and other service that started has a web service first

------
huffer
Completely off-topic: what is this site trigger.io? I cannot access it –
apparently it is flagged as suspicious:
<http://s16.postimage.org/blt1xsb79/triggerio.png> It certainly doesn't seem
to be a site hosting porn or child abuse content, nor does it sound like a
terrorist cell propaganda site – so why would it be blocked? Should I put my
paranoid hat on?

Also, does it happen to be any cached/alternative sources for that content
that's not hosted there so I can read the article? Normally I could use an
anonymous proxy but it seems like too much of a hassle (it's not that easy to
find an anonymous one that hasn't been already banned internally as well).
Thank you!

------
amberes
Comparing apples to oranges here. Most apps are tools, something you use...
While most sites aren't and only provide information.

Also, I can casually browse dozens of sites and completely forget about them
afterwards... I don't casually install dozens of apps.

------
jemka
People use their mobile phone for apps more than they do for browsing the web?

Really? No shit.

Show me that people are using their mobile apps more than they're using their
desktop/laptop browsers and you'll have something to write about.

~~~
pors
Well, that is what the article claims, they compare their own stats with
comScore and Alexa stats. But I think the conclusion is indeed flawed as the
Flurry stats include people with smart phones with apps on it that use Flurry,
which is just a subset of all people using the Internet. They should include
the absolute numbers to make the story complete. But yeah, there is a strong
trend we can't deny :)

------
mckilljoy
I'm sure most of those 94 minutes per day are playing Angry Birds and other
mobile games. I don't expect we are going to see any new billion-dollar
companies being founded over the next 10 years that primarily sell mobile
games. There is plenty of mobile opportunity, but the big players are already
fighting over the obvious stuff. I'm not convinced mobile has significantly
more profitable hidden gems than consumer web, certainly not based just on
this article. I wouldn't recommend web devs change their careers anytime soon.

~~~
c1sc0
You have data to back up those claims? I see plenty of people doing plenty of
other things besides playing silly games on their mobile.

------
steder
I think the article is buying into the notion that the web can never be as
rich an experience as the native application. I think that the last few years
of explosive growth in terms of cloud services and web applications have made
it pretty clear that web applications are a viable alternative. Why won't web
applications work for mobile devices as well?

Is the argument simply that the app market is less crowded? Is a comparison of
the number of websites on the internet(apples) to the number of android
applications(oranges) that compelling?

~~~
jarcoal
I don't think the web can ever be as fast moving as a native environment.
That's one of the major downfalls with being compatible with all platforms.

~~~
rafcavallaro
Add to this the fact that it is very much in the interest of one of the larger
mobile players, Apple, to keep the native experience superior to the html5
mobile browser experience in order to differentiate their iOS offering from a
generic "mobile web browser." For example, WebGL is only available for iAds,
not for mobile Safari web apps, while openGL is of course available to native
iOS apps.

------
tlack
Is there some place we can all share data (perhaps anonymously) about what %
of our users are using mobile browsers? I'll go first: on one of our large-ish
travel websites, almost 10% of our users were using a mobile browser (this
includes both phones and quasi-mobile devices like tablets). This site isn't
very well tuned for mobile so I was pretty surprised by the numbers. We do not
have a mobile app.

------
kenjackson
The web has a serious problem today. I never know how a site will work on my
browser. I feel like the web has become a guessing game. Whereas with mobile
apps, I know that if you're in the app store then you'll work as expected.

~~~
Yaggo
You can tailor web apps for specific devices/browsers/resolutions to control
the user experience, just like with native apps. There are no shortcut for
good UX on 3" touch screen and 27" mouse-driven screen without lot of extra
work.

------
badclient
Correct me if I am wrong but I thought mobile apps aren't an alternative to
the web?

Do they mean mobile apps vs. desktop Internet use? That would make more sense.

------
yblokhin
Can anyone tell me if this is a nicely wrapped Phonegap or a completely new
commercial framework that does the same thing as Phonegap?

~~~
kylebrown
Looks like a new framework that does the same thing as phonegap. The 'thin
native wrapper over html5 webview' isn't actually that hard to do (even for
multiple platforms). I prefer to roll my own because, last time I tried
PhoneGap, the extra bloat made my app sluggish. It was much more responsive in
a minimal custom wrapper.

------
costacoast
As a web developer I have typically argued in favor of write once, execute
everywhere robust web apps being the future of mobile interaction. Having
built websites and apps designed to work well on mobile however, this
typically leads to a stream of constant headaches trying to accommodate for
the myriad of different mobile browsers and features each support/allow.

Similar to the way that different desktop browsers each roll out new feature
support, and often times support features in completely different ways (CSS
transparencies/gradients anyone?) mobile browsers have even slower and more
varied support for features and interaction control. This problem with desktop
browsers has kept most web developers and firms I work with from integrating
the latest and greatest HTML5/CSS3 features in all their sites, because there
is a huge handicap in trying to optimize for so many different platforms as
each evolves on its own timeline.

Even though writing the same app to work well in both iOS and Android is a
HUGE undertaking, the advantage is you are only writing your application to
meet two different sets of API specifications. Even better yet since mobile
devs are typically either iOS OR Android experts you can potentially have two
different teams of devs working on the platform they know best instead of
having one html team constantly striving to make your application work well
(or at all) in a dozen different commonly used mobile web browsers.

I applaud Facebook for their efforts to build out a really great looking
mobile web app that does look an awful like their mobile apps, but has anyone
watched someone who doesn't know (or care) about the difference between a
native app and mobile web app use it? I got a fairly tech-savvy family member
a kindle fire recently and it comes pre-installed with a shortcut to the
Facebook mobile web app because the native app is not available in the amazon
marketplace. Watching over their shoulder I was amazed to see how frustrating
the experience was for them when the querystring gets corrupted at certain
points and all they are left with is a PHP whitescreen of death. No loading
symbol, no ability to get out of the corrupted state the browser got itself
into, and generally the user was left with no idea why this wasn't working as
nicely as their Facebook app on iOS/Android that looks exactly the same.

At the end of the day I now lean more toward the side of mobile apps
continuing to be more efficient and effective for apps that require lots of
interaction with the user even if you could technically implement all those
interactions in a browser. The relative simplicity of only having to code for
two platforms instead of 12, and simultaneously providing your users with a
more responsive experience is definitely worth it.

------
notatoad
this article seems to be implying that mobile and app are synonymous. as far
as i can tell, the fact that desktop apps and mobile websites exist is totally
ignored. is this about a shift from web to app, or a shift from desktop to
mobile? and what about mobile web use?

------
mhd
So this is mobile apps vs. web, not internet access via native apps vs access
via browser, right?

------
cooldeal
The analysis and the numbers seem to be very misleading. It counts only mobile
usage which is a tiny fraction of desktop browsing. StatCounter pegs it at
just ~7%.

[http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-
monthly-2010...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-
monthly-201012-201112)

What about adding a 3rd metric for how much time the consumers browse on their
desktops and laptops? That's going to eclipse the time stated in the article.

The reason we're seeing such high app numbers in Flurry is that mobile devices
are not as convenient to browse on compared to laptops and desktops, so apps
like games take over the time spent on such devices.

~~~
nkassis
I'm thinking that maybe this has nothing to do with mobile web vs native app
this could be desktop vs mobile. This post makes it out to be like native apps
are gimping the user share from mobile web but I just thinks it's people doing
what they used to do on the desktop with their phones.

~~~
rhizome
That's what I was thinking, that this has more to do with more people having
web-capable phones than any lack of future for any kind of developer.

------
aneth
Over a billion mobile only users will likely come online in emerging markets
over the next ten years.

Many of those will be in India, where RIM is actually growing like crazy. I
anticipate Windows on Nokia will be a serious player, and Android phones will
drop to prices the masses can afford.

The race is not over and the "mobile web" may yet turn out to be the dominant
platform.

~~~
wavephorm
I am in a position to boldly predict a new startup will emerge with what will
eventually become the dominant mobile web platform.

