I actually love my BB.

The cost for building & maintaining native apps for many platforms (and versions thereof) is prohibitive and very hard to justify ROI. If the required features can be delivered by a Web app, it should be the first choice.

Check my thoughts around this topic at www.gmanju.com (my blog)

It makes sense for both end-users and small startups alike who both want to see rapid innovation available to all users.

I've written a blog post about it here:

http://blog.psonar.com/2010/03/19/theres-no-app-for-that-2/

Enjoy.

Richard,
CTO Psonar Limited

However, user testing of people attempting tasks on their mobile devices shows that the apps have much higher usability than the websites. (See http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-usability.html)

Thus, it is likely that the most important use cases for mobile business will be fulfilled by apps, with less important ones relegated to less-usable sites, where users will fail more often and thus use less.

Of course, it's also important to remember that the majority of websites support tasks that are not well suited for mobile use in the first place. Such sites shouldn't even made a mobile version, and those few users who do want to access them from a phone will have to suffer the truly miserable experience of a desktop site repurposed onto a tiny screen.

As a relative proxy, we know where Apple is pointing - native, and we also know that in the whole time that iPhone has been out, that no game-changing sites/services have popped up which are wholly web-based (or mostly so) targeting the 75M installed base of iPhones and iPod Touches. That's not because Apple has blocked it; quite the contrary. The market (to date) on developer and consumer side has spoken.

Similarly, while we know Google's mantra that what is good for the web is good Google, I believe the core Android apps that they've built are native apps, no?

Again, my only point is that I or anyone knows the end-game, but that these type of "reach a conclusion," "find some adjacent data" and "connect the dots" reports are meaningless.

A more reasoned approach would be to look at the data of the key players and their bets, map it to where usage and consumption is occurring and come up with scenarios of how these markets might evolve, putting forth a thesis about which approach is the highest probability bet.

That's a little more honest of an approach to analysis, in my opinion.

(sorry for the rant.) :-)

Mark

And, of course, web development is much cheaper than application development.

See our touchscreen mobile website http://www.mobilizetoday.com Nowadays, websites should be more accessible for mobile phones to reach mobile users.

We don't need unnecessary fragmentation. Facebook app for iPhone, another one for Android, another one for Symbian, etc. This is ridiculous. The PC world tries to move away from this as much as possible, so why is the mobile world going backward?! Granted, some apps are better suited to be native but lots of them (some high profile ones, in fact) shouldn't be. Realtime interaction/notification? Last I checked, my desktop web browser can do that (e.g. web-based IM, Facebook). So, unless it was (intentionally) crippled, your mobile web browser should be able to do that too.

I think that it is a good thing to have both gain enough market share for people to be interested enough to continue their innovation in both arenas. We want the platform specific technologies to be able to take advantage of all the cool capabilities of their platform (aka games, entertainment) without sacrifice in order to drag along the other less capable platforms. At the same time, we also need a unified, sophisticated and capable technology like HTML5 to be used across the board (social, shopping, etc.) in support of common applications without having to build device specific versions.

Once again, the market has found its way to efficiency and it will continue into the future.

Webapps require devices and data plans that are too expensive for the majority of consumers. And independent devs don't have a good business model for monetizing them. A developer can sell an app but getting people to pay for accessing a webapp is tricky.

Keep in mind that a key advantage of webapps, easy deployment, has largely been met with seamless app stores. It's unclear what other advantage are there to webapps.

I'm not prepared to say which will win, maybe a mix of both will co-exist. But let's be realistic and look at what people are using and how apps are developed and paid for.

All things being equal (platform standardization, hardware penetration, etc.), users will drive the market and decide which experience suits for which activities. The 'web' user experience has a lot of catching up to do with the iPhone/Android/Nexus etc., native application experience at the moment - that is for sure. But hardware penetration levels will be a barrier in the short to medium term.

I hesitate to compare it to Blackberry but if I could read/respond all my mail in the browser I would not need a client for it.

Second, is cost to develop - for the most part, a mobile site is less expensive to develop vs. a Mobile App. That's changing quickly in some niches and of course there are exceptions. For example, I can create a Wordpress mobile theme in minutes for free but to create a Mobile App might take a few hundred dollars. That's a simple example, but my guess is the same applies to more complex environments.

At the end of the day, my guess is that mobile sites will win over mobile apps in terms of volume created. Question is what will usage, ROI, and customer engagement look like?

There will always be the need for local applications and 'cricial' data (email, contacts, apps such as Evernote) to reside and execute locally, so it will not become a unilateral migration.

I'd much prefer browser-based applications, saving my local storage space for multimedia content. Remind me to sell Sandisk stock when this becomes reality. :)

How will companies cope with creating sites viewable on different devices? The same way they do that now on the desktop web with different OSes, browsers, resolutions, and settings.

Not coincidentally, we just released HTML5 app search + discovery support at AppStoreHQ (in addition to our native iPhone app search offering). It's still just a tiny fraction of our total inventory, but we'll make a point of sharing the numbers as they grow (and we'd love your help to make them grow! http://blog.appstorehq.com/post/367758335/html5-or-native-apps-either-way-weve-got-you )