Mobile web versus native, again

If you’re in software, or more specifically mobile software, then you’ve more than likely had a discussion around mobile web versus mobile apps. The general argument is based around a belief that at some point mobile web (HTML5) would eventually overtake and be the primary way people consume content on a device as opposed to native applications, which are the dominant technology choice today.

The argument, which was extremely aggressive back in 2010, has settled down considerably over the last two years. The primary reason is that mobile applications have continued to grow, while mobile web has hit a plateau and is not the primarily location where people innovate. Let me be clear though: that’s not to say mobile web isn’t growing… it is. But mobile web is growing at the expense of PC web, not apps. This is a very important distinction: PC browser traffic is largely dropping across the board (some notable exceptions are locations that are heavily commerce based) while mobile usage is increasing. Thus, you’re seeing more traffic on mobile browsers. But at the same time you’re still seeing native application usage increase in greater numbers than overall smartphone adoption.

Put simply: mobile web is taking over PC web market share while native applications are growing.

Then, if you look even closer at the numbers you discover that much of the mobile web usage is not coming from the phone’s browser, but through an application container. What does that mean? It means that more people are looking at mobile websites through apps like Facebook rather than the native browser. If you use Facebook, Twitter or other applications then it’s a more common occurrence that you are pushed to a mobile web (or “WebView”) experience from within the application, as opposed to “surfing” on your phones browser.

Again put simply: when people view a mobile web site, they often do so through an app and not through a browser.

OK, so what does all this mean?

It means a whole lot of things, the biggest of which is that many companies are still very backwards with their mobile direction and strategy. I’m certainly not saying you should abandon mobile web and go all-in on native applications, but I am saying that you need to be aware that your mobile web site is likely to be viewed within an app. That fact should impact your strategy, and it also has another potential implication for a currently popular technology: responsive design.

Responsive design has two basic points, one of which is extremely important and one that will become much less important over time. Many companies are pushing hard into responsive design, but recently there have been a number of technical voices pointing out that there’s a future-proof flaw in the technology that people aren’t thinking about: namely, are the sites optimized to take advantage of the likely container, an app?

The smart part about responsive design is that the page layout and technology is accounting for multiple screen sizes, form factors and interface models. This makes a lot of sense, but in some cases it means that responsive design is a bridge in a world where mobile devices and tablet devices are taking market share away from the PC. The question is, will responsive design be the right answer for the world where 90% of the devices accessing the content are tablet and mobile?
Well, yes in the sense that responsive design will make mobile websites consumable on the dominant devices. In other words, it’s doing a good job of getting companies ready for a mobile world. But there’s another factor that it doesn’t touch, and that’s taking advantage of the platform it’s being run on… namely, within an app container.

At first glance, an app container is just a WebView and isn’t anything special. But that’s a bit of a short-sighted view of what’s really happening and over the next 18 months the world is going to realize this. If you’re being pulled up from within an application you have several capabilities that change from being pulled from a simple browser. By the same hand, being pulled from an application also means you lose some of the basic controls (or at least, they are differently enabled) from a browser.

Here’s a simple example. Let’s say you are FOX Sports. The majority of your pages are being pulled in now from Facebook, as opposed to people coming to your site from the browser. Now let’s say as a brand you like the ability of having a bookmark on your phone’s home screen, or saved into your phone’s history. If the user is looking at you from a browser, there’s a one-click way to do that. If the user is looking at you from within an app, there isn’t a simple way to do that (you have to punt the page out to the browser, reload it, then can do it). Why is all that important? Because in terms of “owning” the customer and leaving an anchor behind on the phone… if your pages are getting viewed through Facebook then it’s Facebook that owns the history and the place on your user’s phone. Not you.

Then there’s a more interesting scenario; native apps can layer on top of a WebView to provide additional capabilities. A common example are apps that place specialized directions or pins on top of a map. The map is a WebView, the native controls are sitting on top of it. Why is this interesting? Because it means that if you understand the various controls Facebook or Twitter use with their WebView component, you can write mobile web pages that have special hooks to take advantage of those capabilities. So let’s say you’re Facebook and you open up some controls to allow for specialized marketing, or ways to “Like and Share” from within your app. A mobile web developer could take advantage of those controls to make their pages more interesting.

So what does that all have to do with responsive design? Not much from a technical standpoint, but quite a bit from a philosophical one. It comes down to what you believe: will mobile web one day topple native apps, or will the world play out like it currently is with native apps?

The biggest argument for mobile web winning in the end was about control, namely that developers and users would naturally gravitate toward the ecosystem that didn’t require Apple to approve their content. This argument made sense when compared to the old world where Verizon or AT&T would have to approve your app… a process that could take weeks/months and often required heavy relationship building with a carrier rep. But even though people grumble about Apple’s discoverability within their App Store, the big fears of Apple becoming a tyrant have proven to be largely unfounded (or unimportant). While Apple certainly exerts plenty of control, it’s not perceived to be an obnoxious control.

So what to take away? Five key things:

1. Mobile Web is taking market share away from PC Web, not apps.

2. The app market continues to grow at a healthy rate.

3. More people are viewing mobile web pages from within an app than from within the mobile browser.

4. Responsive design is a good bridge to get sites ready for mobile, but there’s another big step that responsive doesn’t touch.

5. There will be a very big push to create technologies that make mobile web smarter from within a native app. This will be the big mobile technology push in 2014-2015.

It is an exciting time. Mobile is a great space to be in, but more than ever the people driving it must be smart, forward thinkers and not traditional technology people, or “re-tweeters”. The world is begging for leaders and visionaries for the space, and far too many companies are stumbling toward mobile. This isn’t a slow transition, it’s a dramatic change. You can’t mildly shuffle your traditional thinking toward the new world of mobile and expect everything to work out fine. It’s why so many companies continue to play catch up, but find themselves further and further behind.

It is an exciting time.