The discussions about the death of mobile applications continues on the blogosphere. At ForumOxford, a couple of discussion threads on the same topic have appeared, with the last one discussing if Mobile Apps, Dead or Dying? If you know me, you know that I can’t keep quiet about such topic; especially since all they do is contribute noise versus actually doing something about the problem. Below is what I just posted over at ForumOxford:
It blows my mind the discussion that mobile apps are dying.
Yes, the trend towards mobile web is that its adoption will continue to grow, for certain kinds of applications, over certain periods of time. Mobile web suffices today for most of the mobile applications out there, which are pretty minimalist in nature. As browsers become more capable, that trend should increase. *That will take years*.
That said, I can’t wait to see the effect of iPhone and Android on the perception of Local applications.
Do you want to make money today? You can. There is money to be made in mobile, from texting to native to voice. I recently write about this — see On Mobile applications, RIP:
The problem that I have with the folks that come in and shake the tree and leave, especially the ones who are not out there, talking to customers, and building applications, is that, well, they are contributing zero, nada. All they do is shake the tree, and leave.
What Mace wrote in his blog piece was based on “what he has heard from a friend”, and charts without empirical data; granted, we all know that is the trend. But we can’t make a decision on how to move forward based on that. Right now some of us (yes people in this list) are making money from web, texting, and local applications (native, Java ME, etc). How to approach the market: texting, MMS, voice, web, local should be based on 1) the particular market-niche you are after, and/or 2) what your customers are asking you to build for them, and 3) maximizing user reach based on your specific market/project requirements.
About Glu’s claims of 25K SKUs, I’ll bet you that has to do more with assets (images, ring-tones, etc.) than anything else — and if not, there is something inherently wrong on the way they build mobile applications. I wrote about that (also read the comments) — see Russell Buckley on The Frustrations of Java ME.
The vision about mobility is *finally* happening; embrace it. Don’t let others, especially those tree shakers who don’t contribute a thing, distract you.
CEO