ReadWriteWeb

For many coders, developing an app is a labor of love. Hacking SDKs and APIs and making a beautiful and functional user interface is a challenge that many developers relish. Like everybody else though, developers need to eat. To eat, one needs to make money. Herein lays the problem for many developers trying to put together mobile HTML5 Web apps: there are no simple avenues to monetization.

HTML5 development studio appMobi wants to change that, especially for game developers. Today, the company announced playMobi, a cross-platform HTML5-based game development, deployment and monetization software developer kit. playMobi facilitates in-app purchasing, analytics and social constructs for game developers.

One of the greatest benefits of the mobile Web is that it gives a variety of small to medium businesses an easy way to create a mobile presence without spending a lot of money on native app development. There are a variety of services that can optimize a website for the mobile Web and one of those, DudaMobile, is celebrating a big milestone today.

In a demonstration of its confidence in the future of HTML5, business newspaper The Financial Times has acquired the development firm that built its mobile Web app. London-based Assanka was purchased by the FT for unnamed sum of money.

The firm will presumably be absorbed into the FT's existing operations, allowing it to build mobile apps internally rather than outsource them. Whatever the price tag may have been, it represents a pretty significant investment in mobile for a newspaper company.

When it comes to the nuances of the mobile landscape, there are not many people out there more knowledgeable than analyst Chetan Sharma. We have long relied on the work of Sharma at ReadWriteWeb to inform our own reporting and opinions about where the mobile industry is going. For the start of 2012, Sharma turned it around. He surveyed a wide swath of insiders to determine what the biggest stories were in 2011 and how the industry will evolve in the new year.

By consensus, the top story was the rise of Android and its dominance over the ecosystem. A close second was the passing of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. The Kindle Fire, intellectual property battles and "other" issues round out the top five. Who will succeed in 2012? How will developers make money? What will be the breakthrough category in mobile in 2012? Sharma's results are below.

Facebook has the most downloaded native application of all time. It also has perhaps the most visited mobile website of all time with nearly 350 million users and growing, using everything from basic feature phones to the smartest smartphones. It is available everywhere. The company started working on mobile solutions in 2006 and since then has grown with the times, using the tools available to them as they went along, from m.sites and WebKit touch interfaces to HTML5. Facebook's creed, really just a way to make their developers' lives easier, is to write once, run everywhere. This has been next to impossible.

Facebook mobile is predicated on browser technology. As Facebook's engineering manager Dave Fetterman says in the transcript below, the browser is what Facebook is good at, how it got where it is now and how it will iterate for the future of mobile. We will touch on the future tomorrow, but be sure to read Fetterman's presentation at Facebook's f8 developer conference below because it will inform what we are going to explore tomorrow morning. Really, how did Facebook design for all those platforms and devices?

Throughout the year we have tracked the how developers have made design decisions, and the tools available to small-to-medium businesses for creating websites on the mobile Web. On Tuesday we wrote about a new suite from Conduit that makes it easier than ever to create dynamic websites for native platforms and the mobile Web. Yet, despite all of Conduits tools, apps and the mobile Web are in danger of falling into the trap of cookie-cutter design.

There are almost a million apps in the wild between the major platforms, with Android and iOS making up the vast majority of them. Let's be honest here: many of those apps are subpar and unimaginative. The mobile Web is not much better. Yet, there is hope. That is the subject of this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.

Mobile Web apps are starting to make a dent in the developer sphere and are beginning to find space on consumers' smartphones and tablets. Two British companies believe that Web apps need an icon unto itself to differentiate from native apps and have created differentiator for consumers to know when they are using an app designed for the mobile Web.

Mozilla is not just thinking of putting together a mobile operating system, the open source project actually has a roadmap in place to bring a demo sometime in the first quarter of 2012. We have seen a bunch of would-be mobile OS competitors rise and fall in fortunes over the last year or so, but Mozilla might actually have the name recognition and engineering clout to make a real dent in the market.

Mozilla's mobile OS would be open in the truest sense of the term open. Open is what Mozilla does. Mozilla will be working on bringing HTML5 as a fully functional OS to mobile. A look at Mozilla's roadmap is below.

HTML5 development company appMobi is releasing a new browser today called MobiUs that will give mobile Web apps the same type of functionality that now is currently only enjoyed by native apps for platforms like iOS and Android. AppMobi thinks of MobiUs as the replacement for Flash in mobile - it renders mobile websites like a Flash extension would and gives developers device access in ways previously unavailable to in HTML5.

MobiUs is technically a mobile browser. That is not the way appMobi thinks it will be used though. The company expects it to be function more like a browser extension. Like Flash, users will be prompted to download it once and from then it will just run in on the device. According to appMobi CTO Sam Abadir, MobiUs, "is the Flash killer now as opposed to five years from now."

In the new stable release of its Chrome browser, Google has ramped up the importance of Web apps on the desktop. The New Tab page is now a Web app launcher with big, friendly icons. The new look was added to the beta channel last month. The Chrome Web Store was also renovated. It's now a "wall of images" that shows app info with one click.

Google recently implemented new technologies in Chrome enabling Web apps to securely execute low-level code in the browser, blurring the line between Web and native apps. Google wants Web apps everywhere, and today's Chrome release is full of new ways to promote them.