With all the attention being garnered by the mobile web these days, further life’s being breathed into that age-old argument of which is the better strategy for mobile: developing mobile web content, or standalone applications.
Like so many things, this argument gets ridiculously oversimplified in a desire to make it a black/white, either/or proposition — ignoring the reality of the situation, that both will coexist. The vitriol this debate summons indicates that it’s unlikely it will die soon. Still, it seems pretty clear that some stuff is better suited to standalone apps, while other ideas can be made better or more easily as web content.
But perhaps the real thing to takeaway from this argument isn’t a dogmatic insistence on the supremacy of one, or other, but rather that while both approaches have their own benefits, they also have tremendous flaws that cause great consternation among developers. Neither approach is perfect and both bring plenty of pitfalls. Maybe a better way forward would be to concentrate on patching some of those holes, or at the very least, not repeating them.
On last 3GSM, there were many companies doing on device portals applications. I predict, in 2008 3GSM, there will be much less of them. Why?
Because one year ago, it was still not clear, which philosophy will win, but next year, it will be clear. Browsing will win. There is only one reason, try to ask those application portal companies: “When you will have iPhone client?”, there are basically too many different clients there says. It’s not possible to develop for so many devices.