Making Way For A Mobile Platform

The World Wide Web is the most accessible resource of information in existence. All the information you can imagine is available at any time no matter where you are located in the world. For many users, information need not be available when they are away from their desk. They may casually browse the internet after work or on their lunch hour, catching up on the latest news or logging onto their favourite social networking websites. They consider the internet to be useful, but do not necessarily rely on it from day-to-day. It is, however, becoming increasingly popular to expect internet access on the move, and with the establishment of the ‘Smartphone’ in recent years this has become a realisation.

Mobile web access has been around for quite some time now, but the experience has changed somewhat over the last 10 years. In 1999, Nokia released its first WAP enabled mobile phone (WAP meaning Wireless Application Protocol - a simplified method of sending data wirelessly to a mobile device). It was far different from the mobile browsers that we are so used to working with today. Like other primitive WAP devices, the Nokia 7110 could only view web pages that were specially written in a new language designed specifically for mobiles (Wireless Markup Language). Initially, this meant that businesses would have to invest sufficient time and money developing mobile friendly websites as well as learning new technologies.

Mobile Device Sales in 2009

In recent years, Smartphone sales have vastly increased and, according to business and technological research company Gartner, are up approximately 24% in 2009. The soar in popularity of the Smartphone depicts the change in expectations a typical user has about their mobile device. If we were buying a phone 10 years ago, we would have been more focused on its aesthetics, size and support for multimedia messaging or games. However, we can argue that a modern day mobile phone user would much rather have email support and a rich internet browsing experience than play games or have as small a device possible.

What does this mean for the web development industry?

As a web application developer here at Bitopia one of the most important ideals when creating software is accessibility. A major part of creating an accessible interface is knowing our target audience and, more specifically, knowing our target audience’s hardware. Internet traffic from mobile devices exploded in 2009 and now accounts for nearly 1.5% of all internet traffic. With the growing popularity of Apple’s iPhone and other devices, this will only continue to increase. From a software perspective this means that users may well wish to access websites on-the-go via their Smartphone and may even wish to work with their existing web applications. With more than 32 million users Opera Mini is the most popular mobile browser in the world. It is a strong ambassador for other mobile browsers such as iPhone’s Safari, and provides a rich internet browsing experience with support for the majority of desktop browsing technologies. Such browsers allow for the creation of rich mobile web applications, taking working on-the-go to the next level.

The creation of the iPhone App store in July 2008 saw the birth of the iPhone Application. When initially released, the iPhone’s functional capability was fairly limited and so Apple pushed for the idea of allowing developers to create their own applications for release via their app store. Using this approach, Apple have taken the idea of mobile applications and made them platform dependent. This has had a negative impact on the progression of the mobile web application front. Instead of developers producing applications available through a web browser (hence being platform independent - available via modern mobile browsers and an internet connection) they are developing applications specifically for a target device such as the iPhone (Nokia, Google Android and Windows devices are all now following this pattern).

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is primarily responsible for driving standards across the web, takes the idea of an "Open Web" very seriously. An Open Web is one where proprietary formats are minimal, even non-existent, and content is the same for all users. If developers continue to make iPhone specific applications how is the mobile web supposed to become openly accessible? Recently, it seems that companies who continue to publicly support the idea of an Open Web are caught up in the craze of platform dependent mobile applications. On 17th February 2010 the BBC news website published an article declaring the BBC’s intentions to supply iPhone applications for news and sport content from April 2010. An Open Right Group spokesperson commented on the BBC’s decision, declaring that it would be far more appropriate to concentrate on open platforms to allow everyone to access the same content regardless of their chosen device.

Mobile Browser Share by O/S in 2009

Since its release in 2007 the iPhone has sold approximately 40 million units, a massive feat for a company’s first attempt at a mobile device. Google’s Android operating system has not had as great a success in comparison, yet continues to compete with Apple by recently releasing its own app store to offer Android applications similar to iPhone applications. Nokia handsets running the Symbian operating system are still the most popular platform for mobiles. However, many of these devices are never used for mobile connectivity. To paint a better picture let’s take a look at some statistics from Market Share to depict the most popular mobile web browsing device...

Smartphone Sales in Millions

While Symbian is the best selling mobile operating system, Apple’s iPhone is the most popular device for browsing the web. The iPhone app craze has produced some interesting points:

• Currently, there are approximately 134,000 published applications on the iPhone app store
• Every 2.5 minutes a new application is submitted (that’s 3600 new applications submitted each day)
• To date, 3 billion applications have been downloaded from the app store. Of these applications:
  • Only 30% are still being used 1 day after purchase
  • Only 5% are still being used 20 days after purchase

What strikes me most about this is the fact that only 5% of the 3 billion applications downloaded from the App Store are still in use after 20 days. This means that of the 3 billion sales to date only 150 million are potentially deemed valuable by the user, leaving a huge 2.85 billion applications redundant. Of course, while these sales figures are only estimates, they still provide an important insight into the craze taking the mobile world by storm.

Apple’s App Store review process makes it a nightmare for businesses deploying their software on the iPhone platform. Even though there are private, small scale deployment options available through Apple’s Enterprise Developer Programme (at an additional cost) I would always recommend businesses taking their bespoke software solutions into the open platform via the web. With Smartphones now supporting many desktop technologies and allowing for a richer internet experience than ever, mobile web applications are the future for businesses aiming to deploy their bespoke software solutions through the mobile channel.

One of the biggest advantages of deploying web applications through the mobile browser is the ability to push updates out to all users without the need for a (re)installation process. In contrast, a platform dependent application such as an iPhone App would require submission to Apple for a successful review process and finally the re-installation of the application on each user’s handset. In August 2009, Apple released (somewhat begrudgingly) their app store approval process. This detailed an app approval team of approximately 40 reviewers. Now let’s take those interesting points from earlier, this would mean that there is around 90 new apps for each of the 40 staff to review. As if that isn’t bad enough, Apple claims that each new app is examined by two separate people, so that 90 apps per week doubles to 180 apps per reviewer per week (approximately 13 minutes per app).Talk about a bottleneck. As a software developer I cannot begin to imagine the frustration felt by thousands awaiting their app to be approved by Apple only to have it placed ‘In Review’ or rejected. What’s more, if a bug is encountered whilst reviewing the application you have to then resubmit the app again after you’ve fixed it.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe that iPhone applications (as well as other branded platforms such as Blackberry, Google and Windows) offer some great advantages when developing apps for their devices. Platform specific apps allow developers to utilise the device’s core feature-set (accelerometer, compass, camera, thermometer, GPS etc) to enhance the user experience and bring in a revenue stream if they choose to add a price tag. However, the cost of developing an application for a single platform could cripple a business model and, should a company change their App Store conditions, you could have applications pulled from sale even after they have been approved. There are advantages for both approaches to application deployment, but businesses should realise that choosing to channel their software through an app store leaves them with little control. Businesses looking to offer mobile applications should consider the complications by deploying to specific platforms. For many companies the flexibility offered by an open platform makes it a far more efficient and cost-effective option.

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