The future of the web is mobile and the future of mobile is… the web
our take on the evolution of mobile applications
When confronted with the Apple appstore (and android Googleplay) overwhelming global success, you would be tempted to believe that Steve Jobs, back in 2007, had deliberately chosen the native route. But a few months before the iphone launch, the Apple boss was inviting developers to create amazing WEB 2.0. mobile apps based on Safari webkit (http://bit.ly/1cfgJpt). Unfortunately, in those days, mobile browsers and networks didn’t live up to his vision. One year later the appstore was born to enable mobile applications to interface with the iphone native functions while offering offline usage, necessary due to weak mobile connections. Simultaneously the HTML5 standard was being adopted by the international developers community and it would become increasingly popular in parallel with the expansion of 3G (now 4G) and the dramatic improvement of mobile browsers performances, accelerated by CPU advances and an increasing number of APIs giving access to the devices core functions. The capacity of browsers local storage was also improved, enabling today some html5 apps to run offline after initial loading.
September 19, 2012 was a key milestone for developers with the iOS6 launch, finally enabling Safari to connect itself to the phone’s camera and photo galleries. From that day on, it would be possible to create a mobile web app using the number one asset in any smartphone: photos. Nevertheless, we are still facing the usual “chicken & egg” problem. While the market of mobile web apps hasn’t reached a critical mass, developers still have a preference for a native (& hybrid) approach, which almost guarantees a well-paid job, instead of improving the javascript / HTML5 skills you need to create mobile web apps that can rival in terms of user experience with their native counterparts. An outstanding mobile web app is not “only” a “responsive website”, it’s a format which requires an expertise which is still pretty scarce on the market.
One year ago, I decided to bet everything on a mobile web app project, adsy.me, which would prove to the mass market (not just to the geeks ;-)) that a mobile browser allows you nowadays to do things you would have thought impossible. We’ve set the bar very high, deciding to launch a type of application which doesn’t even exist in the native universe: the first mobile app enabling anyone to create… mobile apps, the Geocities of the smartphone generation. The challenge is huge, especially if you want to give the same experience quality to both iOS fans and android aficionados, while offering a desktop visualization of the mobile content. Thanks to the talent of our developers, we are about to release an amazing product and I truly hope that the efforts invested into this ambitious project will pave the way for other entrepreneurs so that finally, as it happened in the early 2000s on desktop computers, the open web can become the reference platform for the future of applications. Because, while we already know that the future of the web will take place on mobile, we still have to build the future of mobile… on the web.
Sign up on http://adsy.me to create free mobile apps on your smartphone, in the mobile browser.
