Leverage in the mobile market
This is a good post about the current leverage enjoyed by entrepreneurs in the web application/services arena: http://startupboy.com/2009/11/09/the-returns-to-entrepreneurship/
Being as my day job, at http://phodder.com is (mostly) focused on mobile apps, I of course thought about what sort of leverage we enjoy (or don't enjoy) in this market. Currently the Mobile apps space is in the Age of Operating systems. Much like the computer industry in the early 80's there is a huge land grab to figure out which platform is going to dominate. The difference from the 80's is much of the web tools are available through the newer mobile browsers (overwhelmingly WebKit based). That leaves a mobile developer with two options when developing an app: super quick and easy with mobile web tools or more complex/longer dev time with native development kits. Apparently the market, namely the iTunes AppStore, agrees that the native tools are the way to go. The market is purposefully sacrificing some of the advanced leverage of the web universe for the ability to write native tools for the mobile market. As a developer I understand the technical reasons for the use of native tools, but I would like to know what the business case is? (e.g. I find myself more often than not wanting to do the implementation of a mobile app with the native platform tools because they generally provide a more natural way of interfacing with the system). The more I think about it the more it seem the market is backwards on it's current positioning of native over web on mobile platforms. HTML 5 provides access to the hardware for storage and location. I am sure they can fit a camera in the HTML 5 spec some where too. This said, there are 4 distinct advantages for native that I can think of: Games, VOIP, accessing external accessories, and the ability to sell discreet units of software. The other interesting thing to note, is about 80% of all mobile apps I have written for customers required a web service backing it to distribute data between devices. Essentially, we are writing 50% or more of the web app that would need to be developed for an all web solution anyway. Anyone want to explain to me why more mobile apps are not web based?
