This is Swipe, a blog by pinch/zoom about mobile, design, user experience, usability, development and the future of technology.
Perhaps the strongest argument in favour of bands and mobile web apps, though, is the idea of search. Scanning a QR code remains a slightly fiddly discovery method for a music app, given the need to a.) explain to many people what a QR code is, and b.) provide instructions on how to scan it, which on iPhone requires downloading an app to do that.
But think of music fans hearing a band for the first time at a festival and wanting to know more. Will they go to their smartphone’s app store to see if that artist has a native app, or will they fire up their browser and Google their name? If the latter, often the sites at the top of the rankings won’t be optimised for mobile, which is where a slick HTML5 web app will be increasingly useful to have.
Have you ever considered that the way you design and build a site or app might be completely wrong? Have you ever actually had to support the top devices on the market, let alone make each of them amazing? Have you ever designed or built a mobile app for devices that don’t even exist yet? Do you know how to do all of this and still come in under budget?
These are just some of the questions that are being answered deep within the mobile community. It is unlike the web. It is opaque. It is competitive. It is an entirely different medium. And it is really really hard. In fact, there is a good chance that everything you think you know about mobile is wrong.
Video from the awesome panel I was on with David Kaneda (Sencha) and Joni Rustulka (Nitobi) talking about designing for HTML5 mobile apps (aka “the mobile web”) during PhoneGap Day.
The first event I can remember where Brian LeRoux and I weren’t going for a higher F-bomb count.
By switching business model on Part 3 during Shark Week, we’ve traded 1,000 downloads a day at $1 for 250,000 daily active users that we can monetise through in-app purchases of optional upgrades”
— Hungry Shark game publisher Future Games of London on switching from a paid download to a freemium model.
I saw this post about Google’s next Android release, called Ice Cream Sandwich over the weekend and found it really telling about the future of the Android platform.
Some of the highlights:
Timing Google needs to ship a new version of Android by October to retain Verizon’s Droid customers, who will be up for renewal and free to choose another smartphone. Droid users make up one of the largest segments of Android customers. Not surprisingly, Verizon today announced a $100 trade-in program to upgrade your smartphone.
Tablets Honeycomb – Google’s Android-on-a-Tablet solution – is still very beta and so far a no-show with consumers. Ice Cream Sandwich will hopefully be an improvement as people consider tablets during the holidays. The iPad has no where to go but down in price, which together with an iPhone makes the iOS platform pretty compelling. Google needs to compete in tablets if they plan to hold on to marketshare.
Performance Android needs some speed. The performance across Android devices ranges from awesome to awful. Hopefully Ice Cream Sandwich will have a solution, but we have no idea what it is. With casual gaming being the number one category of apps, if Android can’t compete with speedy hardware, they can start to lose the very fickle early adopter market.
Competition With Apple expected to release a new device in September or October and Windows Phone 7 Mango coming around the same time, the 2011 holiday buying season is going to be a fierce competition with lots of powerful new hardware options for customers shopping for a new smartphone. The holiday period is traditionally when US consumers upgrade their plans and acquire new devices. With so many Droid customers in play, this holiday season is going to get crazy.
So far we’ve seen some pretty big platform improvements from iOS, webOS, hell even Windows Phone 7. We know these are going to be big releases with lots of new features. Pretty soon we’ll have an idea of what kind of hardware we can expect from Apple, HP, HTC, Samsung and others. Where the hell is Android?
I agree with Ryan’s article, Ice Cream Sandwich will make or break Android.
Marco has put together a very interesting graph comparing the sales of Android tablets and the BlackBerry Playbook to ten year old game systems. Guess who is winning?
It illustrates just how far ahead Apple’s iPad is with 30 million units sold and counting.
Marco has put together a very interesting graph comparing the sales of Android tablets and the BlackBerry Playbook to ten year old game systems. Guess who is winning?
It illustrates just how far ahead Apple’s iPad is with 30 million units sold and counting.
Well Android tablets really had no where to go but up, so not much of a surprise here. I think the word “steals” is misleading. That infers that people either switched to Android from iPad or they bought a Android tablet instead of an iPad. Neither is the case from this report. The report also states no one has fielded a significant competitor to the iPad yet.
Slate has published a hilarious article delving into the reasons why most restaurant websites are so horrifically bad.
The rest of the Web long ago did away with auto-playing music, Flash buttons and menus, and elaborate intro pages, but restaurant sites seem stuck in 1999.
This is particularly important in the days of mobile web. 8.2% of all web traffic in the US is via mobile device, and that figure is climbing rapidly. This is particularly important for restaurant websites – how many times have you looked up a restaurant on your iPhone, only to find that no content on the page displays because the whole thing is a Flash website? It’s happened to me way too many times.
So restaurants, here’s a tip for you – the majority of people visiting your website are looking for a few key things:
Your address
Your phone number
Reservation information
Hours you’re open / serving
The menu (with prices)
The wine list
There might be the odd few people also looking for restaurant history, the chef’s resume, photos of the restaurant or info on the sommelier but I think 98% of people are probably just looking for the most basic information. It’s a bad state of affairs when your users need to go to Yelp or another third party site to quickly find the restaurant address from their phones.
The tides are clearly turning from native apps to HTML5 mobile apps. Financial Times, Amazon Kindle, Walmart and others are going HTML5. Not as a cross platform solution, but as a way around Apple App Store policies.
I’m still not convinced HTML5 is a more cost effective or the inherently cross-platform solution that many companies believe it to be (see my Anatomy of an HTML Mobile App), but that isn’t stopping anyone from believe HTML5 is the future of mobile.
The Beta News article reports on the common sentiment I’m hearing these days:
For developers with limited development resources, HTML5 is a compelling alternative.
Late last month, IDC surveyed more than 2,000 developers about their mobile priorities. Sixty-six percent are “very interested” in HTML5 mobile web development, which has “found its middle-of-the-pack status”, according to the report. “While the focus continues to be iOS and Android application development, mobile websites are becoming a complementary requirement for most developers and businesses today”.
