I’ve railed here against mobile apps that should be mobile web sites. One of my favorite examples is IMDB but there are a ton of them. After all, all it is doing is grabbing web site data and downloading it to the local app anyway. It’s useless without a web connection.
But then the Facebook incident at ReadWriteWeb happened. To refresh your memory, a whole mess of people tried to log into a ReadWriteWeb article on the changes made to Facebook Login page.
All of a sudden I can’t help but wonder if I have it all wrong. Maybe the browser is confusing and its the presence of apps — little icons that live on a home screen — that really makes this easy. Maybe the rise of website-as-application is critical for mainstream adoption of mobile devices. After all, an iPhone app is a lot more fool-proof than a mobile website. (Of course, we can save icons to the home screen but that takes some technical knowledge also.)
If the iPad is the device for my grandmother to use, than should I expect my grandmother to understand how a web browser works and what addresses are? Or does it make more sense for those things to be applications that sit on the desk?
Google did an interesting study, asking what a browser is. Turns out, very few actually know, which might be the greatest reason yet why people are taking to apps like a fly to honey.
Elia Insider 
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With the mobile web don’t you have to spend a lot of effort trying to account for different screen sizes, touch vs no touch,etc?
I was at a Win Phone 7 presentation yesterday and they stressed the point that wp7 devices will have a common set of attributes and therefore be much easier to program and optimize for compared to previous win mo devices.
This made a lot of sense to me and seems to be applicable to mobile web apps too?
Am I missing something? Does it trump or is it just another entry in the pro/con list?
It is always a problem, the variation of screens, and is probably the major reason why Android development scares me silly. (The other is that there are no Android developer success stories.) Given that, most apps can design around screen flow and while making CSS/HTML changes to accommodate different screen dimensions is a problem, no where near as intensive as learning and writing in a different language.
Elia
It is always a problem, the variation of screens, and is probably the major reason why Android development scares me silly. (The other is that there are no Android developer success stories.) Given that, most apps can design around screen flow and while making CSS/HTML changes to accommodate different screen dimensions is a problem, no where near as intensive as learning and writing in a different language.
+1
I love when the google guy asks the other dude “what made you switch to firefox?”.
Answer: “My friend came over and erased all my other browsers and installed it and said your using this now”.
This is awesome – I’ve been doing this with family and friends for years! hehehe.
Elia – I say we build the “Crown” browser 🙂
Oh, sure. Don’t think I want to be in the middle of the browser wars!
Every time I meet a new customer of ours, I see this questions directly or indirectly posed. Most of the people do understand the difference between the native mobile app and the mobile web based offering. But still they have this difficult (or simple?) decision to be made. In my opinion, both the approaches are needed for an enterprise at some or the other time. The roadmap to leverage full potential of mobile computing must address the requirements on case-by-case basis. We are all aware of this, but the question is “how to address it”!
http://yourmobileblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/native-mobile-app-or-mobile-web-app.html
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