Guest Post

The iPhone app is the Flash homepage of 2010

November 8, 2010 12:38 PM
Peter Yared
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MobileBeat 2013
July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA
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In the late 1990s, it was common for companies to spend $50,000 to $150,000 for a Flash homepage that looked like a beautiful brochure. However, they soon learned that Flash was cumbersome, slow to load, expensive to build, and hard to update, and moved on to HTML. Now only specialized, high-end sites are Flash only.

The exact same thing has replayed itself on the iPhone. Companies have paid $50,000, $100,000, and more for an iPhone app. Now they have to keep the iPhone app in sync with their regular web site, and have to add additional native apps, each at a high price point, due to the hypergrowth of Android and newly viable platforms like Windows Phone 7.

Businesses are moving on to HTML5

Banks and airlines, commonly known as technology laggards, are well ahead of the rest of the industry when it comes to mobile access to their systems. Banks and airlines are deploying highly functional, HTML5 mobile optimized websites that offer a high level of functionality relative to their full-fledged websites and existing iPhone apps. What is it that banks and airlines have figured out that Silicon Valley startups with their focus on native Apps have not figured out?

United Airlines and Chase Bank mobile sitesCompare the banks and airline mobile experience to that of the top digital agencies, many of which are still obsessed with Flash home pages and have sites that render incorrectly if at all on mobile handsets. This was first pointed out in a hilarious post by Nick Jones in August with screenshots of the top digital agencies, most of which do not render at all on a mobile browser, and then followed up. AdAge followed up with an article in September about the World’s Worst Agency Websites for iPhone and iPads.

Even at my company Webtrends, with a powerful mobile analytics solution, and recently acquired mobile apps technology, our website renders well on a mobile phone but we are still in the process of optimizing the content so that it easier to navigate.

The native vs. HTML5 battle is irrelevant to businesses

The digerati in Silicon Valley have been arguing ad infinitum about the merits of native vs. HTML mobile apps. Businesses have now picked a winner, given the prohibitive cost of multiple native apps, and the features of an average business app which can be amply supported with mobile HTML5 browsers, which even include GPS.

Carol Steinberg, SVP of E-Commerce for NBC summed it perfectly: “We’re really keen on ROI and making sure what we’re investing in the mobile platform is a worthwhile and good investment. I am just starting to feel that HTML5 will be able to give us the functions we need on our m-commerce site versus app development for the iPhone and Android, which means three platforms we have to maintain and upgrade.” Even , Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s President of Servers and Tools, recently stated that “HTML is the only true cross-platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform”.

There will always be a place for native apps — particularly in communications, gaming, graphics intensive applications — and for the interim they’re an efficient mechanism to process payments until phones are updated with better payment systems. Some businesses may still continue to deploy native apps on one or two platforms that have some additional features. An increasingly popular and almost indistinguishable method of creating a content-oriented app is to wrap a native shell around a browser showing a HTML5 mobile optimized site using technologies like PhoneGap.

Overall native apps have run their course. They get lost in the app store and are hard to find, requiring businesses to post “Available on the App Store” icons on their homepages, where they could just as easily post a “SMS this site to your phone”. Even with over 6 billion apps downloaded, research has shown that most of these are ignored or disposed, and users are only running on average 4-6 apps each, most of which use very native features like communications and the camera.Important apps like maps and Facebook are considered core to the device and are even built in to feature phones nowadays.

Remember, a smartphone is really just a very portable computer

The smartphones of today are fundamentally no different from a computer. Smartphones have browsers, applications, decent screen resolution, and a lot of processing power and RAM. When you use your notebook computer and want to check if your flight is on time, do you download the United Airlines computer application, install it, and then lookup your flight? No, because it’s not 1995.

You use your browser.The browser is not as functional as a Windows or Mac OS application, but it gets the job done. You don’t have to deal with installing anything and remembering where you put an icon on your desktop. As more and more business mobile optimize their websites, downloading an app in order access businesses is going to seem archaic.

Peter Yared is the vice president and general manager of Webtrend Apps, a platform used to engage customers on Facebook, iPhone and Android. He came to Webtrends via the acquisition of Transpond, a social and mobile marketing company he founded in 2007.

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  • Nigeria2009

    'nuff said!

  • http://lekan.bashua.com LekanB

    Interesting article about the ongoing Native vs HTML question. I think the jury is out. It really will depend on what functionality you need.

  • http://twitter.com/mattycapps Matt Capper

    Excellent! We have an opportunity right now to look at what we could have done differently with home computers and not do the same with mobile phones. However, mobile phone companies and tech companies continue to create different operating systems, browsers and standards that don't sync up with one another. HTML 5 compliance and development is the answer, you are 100% correct, develop for all devices at once instead of selecting which app stores you want to be. App stores that are essentially making things worse. I would equate the quality of a majority of the apps in these stores as that of freeware or the discs you now see in the bargain bins in Staples or Walmart. Great post thanks!

  • http://brian.magierski.com Brian Magierski

    Peter, I think you make some fair points, but it will depend on the functionality. For doing the basics of replacing the commerce of a website, like the example of booking an airfare you provided, you are likely right. However, I think mobile is a new platform, offering capabilities that the prior PC/Web platform does not provide. It has the power to transform business processes. For example, while you may book a hotel room just fine on an html5 mobile site, what about managing your experience during your stay? A native app allows you to do much more – order room service, valet and claim your car, get local restaurant reservations, find local running trails, etc. Moreover, what about shaking an app when you need help walking through the hotel, and have the nearest customer experience agent find you on their iPad and/or engage you in a chat session? Mobile has the power to transform business processes, and the power of native apps will be required for employees that are part of that processes as well as the consumers that use them. Your point is a very good one though and I think enterprises need a roadmap for their mobile strategy – lay out the apps and the business cases for each app, prioritize them, and decide the right development and deployment model. Where html5 does the job of filling use cases and business cases, then it should be used. Where native provides the advantage to deliver the use and business cases, then use native and decide which platforms you need to support to reach your audience (top 2 or top 3 at most)

  • http://twitter.com/sarcazza Paul

    Remember that HTML5 web apps can be “installed” from the website they are on, just like native apps, where an icon is placed on your home screen, and the HTML5 offline storage allows for offline use of the app. This is often the desired and preferred intention, especially if the app would be typically used more than once by users. From that point on, the browser is out of the picture because the web app uses the browser engine without you ever seeing it or needing to type in a URL every again for that app. A browser is actually something that gets in the way between the user and the functions the app provides. You could argue that the web browser is the 1995 thing to use.

  • http://twitter.com/footenotes Lisa Foote

    Brilliant, on-point column. Yes, there are “exceptions that prove the rule” like games – hey, just like on desktop PCs! But overall, for 90% of consumers' needs… put a fork in downloaded apps. They're done.

  • http://twitter.com/FuelYourFlash FlashComponents

    Very insightful comment, Brian.

  • http://twitter.com/peteryared Peter Yared

    Hey Brian, great to see your name, been a while! Definitely there will still be a need for native apps for businesses. I don't think that ordering room service, reservations, etc. are good use cases though, as those are text based forms. Accelerometer (shaking) is definitely not available in HTML5 yet though, so would have to be native or a natively wrapped HTML5 app! Peter

  • http://twitter.com/anderageru Gerhard Andrey

    Great post! We share these ideas here @liipThe name we gave to the principles behind is NIWEA; Native Interoperable Web Applications http://www.liip.to/niwea. In customer projects we already proved that pretty complex stuff is doable such as mobile payment http://blog.liip.ch/~VxN. I might add, that we still use PhoneGap to deploy the apps into the stores (right now Apple and Android) but theoretically it would run just fine in the browser. As soon as customers understand that local installation and to be in stores are not really necessary steps you should deal with, we could just go were we always wanted to be: IN THE BROWSER ;)

  • http://twitter.com/MegaMarkHarris Mark Harris

    Good article and I agree. I've been thinking that the one other thing a native app can offer is “offline” use, because it can download content to read/use. But this can easily be solved in a web app. It might be cool to see the browsers implement an “offline” mode, where they crawl a site to a certain depth, and cache it on the phone. Could easily write an app to do this of coarse, but that kind of defeats the point…Or maybe one app you set up like a reader, which will go through several sites you have configured and download them to N-levels deep…

  • http://twitter.com/jan_lukacs Jan Lukacs

    I think it really boils down to how Webkit will evolve in the next period.

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