Bye Bye Web, Hello Apps
carsonified.com
carsonified.com
Mobile is the New Black
I much prefer using the apps for Facebook and Twitter than I do the traditional websites for these two applications.
The reasons for this are applicable to both cases. I find that using apps on my iPod Touch is a more personal experience, probably because the online world I’m exploring is all in the palm of my hand, literally.
I can also access it away from the formalities of a desk. Slouched on the sofa, sitting in the garden and dare I say, on the toilet. You could take your Mac Book Pro’s to these places too but it isn’t the same really is it?
To get it out of the way: Apostrophe S is not a plural!
The main point I wanted to make is this: the smartphone form factor is only one stepping stone on the path of the mobile computing revolution. Just having a computer on the same device as your mobile phone has been worked out. Now we are starting to see the limits of that form factor. No smartphone is yet or ever will be the be-all end-all device. It's only logical that other forms are to follow.
As for the Facebook app example, the article itself highlights the flaws of apps - they are slowly updated and lacking in features compared to the live sites. Try managing your Facebook on the iPhone. Try watching Facebook videos. Try Facebook chat (it's somehow even buggier than the live site).
How much cheaper is it to distribute something as a web app?
With ever more pervasive internet, for a lot of desktop applications, the answer is "a lot cheaper". For mobile phones, it's probably not that much cheaper for people, given that they pay for data. If you try and handle several platforms (S40, S60, Android, iPhone), it is probably cheaper for companies though, so that's a point in favor of the web. Interesting stuff...
The real question is the distribution channel and how that interacts with your business model. Web apps and iPhone apps both have amazing distribution channels: Google and the App Store. However, the App Store is really only amazing for the top sliver of the apps, and the rest get dregs. You do not have to be one of the largest sites on the Internet to make fairly decent amounts of money on Google. (Additionally, I strongly suspect that even if one were to look at only the head of the distribution, traditional software distributed on the web would stomp iPhone apps on pretty much any metric with the possible exception of "dollars earned per programmer hour invested".)
Now desktop apps, on the other hand, desktop apps have nearly nothing to offer a developer that a web app can't do better. They can be distributed over the Internet for cheap! But so can a web app. You can get people to download them... but you can get people to sign up for a web app, easier. You can get people to pay for them... but you can get people to pay for a web app, easier. You can push content updates over the tubes, you can collect usage statistics, you can leverage OSS, you can... but you can do it all easier on web apps.
Which is a shame... I liked desktop apps.