Welcome to the blog
of Gareth Parker.

It’s interesting that you’re seeing both sides of the argument – I didn’t think you’d go for the mobile sites over apps. You know my take on it – I believe a good user experience via a mobile site is a more worthwhile investment than an iPhone app or an Android app.

However, in the case where an independant service provider does not have the resources to craft a quality mobile website, but has opened up their API so that app developers can provide a good interface for their service, I think that’s the perfect space for an application to sit.

What annoys me is when actual web service providers who have no excuse not to provide a quality mobile site, and instead invest their time and effort willy waving over the fact they’ve created an iPhone app.

Apps are of course quite necessary, I like the idea that companies can take advantage of Objective-C, push technology and deep integration with native apps, but I agree that there seems to be a lot of duplicate purpose there.

For web based companies, a decent mobile version of their content can be more powerful and cost effective.

My only frustration with iPhone web apps are that they have a tendency to be poorly designed and implemented.

Simply throwing HTML on the iPhone isn’t the answer. Good design goes a long way.

~moses

Willy waving comments aside, take a moment to remember that it’s because of the iPhone that this discussion actually even exists today. Just a couple of years ago the mobile app market was exclusively a horror story of incompatible and horrific SDKs and development platforms – whilst the mobile web was a desperately unfunny joke. Lousy UIs, slow rendering, wildly different input methods and complete lack of control over user experience had reduced the entire thing to single columns of text. The only people who were building apps were specialist game studios and hardcore obsessive masochists – whilst the only people building mobile sites were service providers and football score peddlers.

The iPhone brought a brilliant, usable browser. Then it brought a fun, fast, highly polished SDK. But most importantly – it brought a single form factor, and a consistent user experience. That means that as a developer – you can build an app, test the hell out of it, and polish polish polish until it’s perfect. That’s the appeal.

Android is not necessarily an equivalent here. The big concern with Android is that it’s still only just getting started and everyone’s expecting it to fragment – badly. How’s your brilliant web app going to play out when the screen size of an Android device is half what you designed for? Or there’s no touchscreen but a little joystick instead? How about when it’s a five way jog dial on the left hand side? The same crap is still blighting much mobile development – many phones still don’t even support basics like XMLHttpRequest! Outside the cosy world of the iPhone (and to a lesser extent the current crop of Androids and the Pre) – it’s still a very inconsistent and unpredictable environment. Development inevitably drops to supporting the lowest common denominator.

The iPhone is a sanctuary from all of this – so it’s not remotely surprising that developers have flocked to it to actually enjoy the experience of developing something that’s mobile, and seeing how people use it.