Native Mobile Apps Vs Web Based Mobile Apps – An Analysis

Mobile apps have taken the world by storm be it Apples iphone apps or growing number of Anrdoid apps or Palm pre apps. Apple has already seen one billion mobile app downloads, Palm pre app catalog hit 1M downloads in less than three weeks of it’s release and Piper Jaffray estimates that mobile app spending will top $13 billion worldwide by 2012,nearly fivefold increase over 2009. It’s like heavens are raining gold over mobile apps, especially native app developers and app stores.

Amid all this the question that makes me think over and over is what are the odds in favor of mobile browser over mobile apps, Let’s have a look at the status quo.

Status Quo is Native Mobile Apps Rule

Native mobile apps can work offline and they don’t need an internet connection to operate.

Native apps deliver great experience to the user, especially  with the recent developments in multitouch capabilities providing richer gaming and multimedia experience.

Native apps can access GPS, calender and address book effectively using PIM data delivering superior functionalities.

Alike web apps native apps do have a sustainable business model. The app store distribution  model has been a great success. Ex:  iPhone and palm besides others.

…and Mobile web apps?

There are some advantages associated with mobile web apps too viz.,

The cost of development is very less compared to the native apps

no upgrade installations required on the user front

cross platform support is easily achieved by supporting different web browsers

and these reasons obviously were not enough for the proliferation of web apps, but here’s a good news.

For local content browser still rules

It has been recently found that when it comes to finding local content, browser still rules, ComScore reported that the number of people in the U.S. who sought local content on mobile devices grew 51 percent from March 2008 to March 2009 and that mobile browser is most popular way to find local content with 20.7 million browser users in March 2009, up 34 percent versus a year ago. Only about half as many people use downloaded apps to find local data.

What will possibly trigger the proliferation of web apps?

Google Gears

Google gears is one of the most important development in the mobile web browser front. Google gears will not only eliminate one of the main hurdles, the offline functionality,it could add richness to the web applications. Google gears though cannot access PIM data it has a  geo-location API which let’s the applications access the location data.

Google gears is already available on IE Mobile, Opera Mobile and Android Devices.

HTML5

HTML5 is probably going to be the native app killer, a ground breaking upgrade to the existing specification, will probably change the way we use web. HTML5 not only enables a browser to play multimedia without any plugins but also brings richness to the web apps without a Flash or Silverlight plugin.

Some of HTML5 features are already available on Firefox 3.5, IE8 and iPhones Safari browser

Flash 10

Full featured flash will be soon available on smartphones running Windows Mobile, Android, Nokia S60/Symbian and Palm beginning 2010.

ARM, the company with the most widely used processors in mobile devices is working with Adobe to optimize Flash 10 for it’s processors pushing it for wider adoption.

Full featured flash obviously implies rich applications and multimedia on web apps.

So what are the odds in favor of web apps?

If further developments happen soon enough, which is quite probable, we will see more web based mobile apps and cloud computing and less native apps, until then you just have to download the mobile apps from the app stores.