MacRumors reports: Google reckons the Web, not App Stores are the future of Mobile as espoused by their Engineering chief, Vic Gundotra, who said:
“We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly thatÂ’s where Google is investing.”
As MacRumors reminds us, Apple only allowed for web development for the first year of the App Store and developers weren’t happy about it. The explosive growth of the AppStore shows us that there’s huge interest in ‘downloaded’ apps.
With HTML5, geolocation, 3D CSS and other features available in the ‘browser’, you can see why this is the case. Is it any wonder that Apple has these advanced features working in the as-yet-unreleased Webkit nightlies, the as-yet-unreleased Snow Leopard and in the ‘already shipping’ iPhone.
Now consider that Nokia, Google, Palm and Apple all use WebKit, the Apple-ified branch of KHTML. It bodes well for iPhone as well as the other first party mobile handset/OS manufacturers that they’ll work well in the web-enabled apps of the future.
I remain a little sceptical. We can’t build the world in the web. There’s always going to be some new doohickey that requires a bit more than the browser can provide. And we’re always going to have those nutters who are more interested in working on the guts of a machine than the application layers (Hi Steve).
What excites me is that these things ARE coming to the browser. As we build more features like location-awareness into our hardware, then we will find more services making use of them. These apps, these features, soon be on every mobile. Every one.
>>>These apps, these features, soon be on every mobile. Every one.
Yes, well, for those who can afford them. Don’t forget that bit. Yes, the iPhone is $99, but the monthly tab for using it is 1.5x that — in the US.
And I’m undecided about eBooks being Cloud-based with reading via browser:
http://ebooktest.blogspot.com/2009/07/ebooks-no-more-ownership.html
I’m skeptical of Google’s claim too. They might feel a little depressed that so many of the cool web applications are being one-upped by native iPhone applications or clients. So now HTML proponents are helping beef up browsers so they can compete. But what’s a browser anyway? Isn’t an OS just a fancy browser? I’m with Bill Gates: fighting over this is more an abuse of terminology than a real change.
@Mike Technology trickles down. HTML5/CSS/JS will be the easiest way to deploy apps to every platform. But they’ll be a certain class of apps.
Some will always need more.
We already pay for ‘access’ to software and music. Why would books be different? And does it bother you more?
@Jeff – most apps pulling in Internet data ( be they ebooks or amazon info) are just incredibly specialised browsers. And browsers are just jazzed up FTP programs.
I agree. We will always need note for the best apps but it lowers the bar. My experience with handhelds says HTML5/CSS is aimed at Flash and Silverlight – which either work poorly on mobile or not at all.
>>>We already pay for ‘access’ to software and music. Why would books be different? And does it bother you more?
Let it be made explicit that it’s a cloud service. People aren’t keen on Shortcovers for that reason — that the books are in the Cloud. Books are quite different than streaming music or movies, for most readers. And the pricing doesn’t scale to music streaming monthly fees. The books are still with book-like prices.