Reports of the Mobile Web’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
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January 9th must have been a scary day for the Mobile Web. Steve Jobs stood on a stage at MacWorld and told the entire mobile industry not only that it would be competing with its much-rumored iPhone, but that it finally lets users browse the “real web,” and not just those plain, boring “mobile” sites. Every company, consultant, and developer who had spent time or money working on a great mobile site to give their users a better mobile experience must have felt like they’d wasted their time. And here we are, just over a month after the coveted iPhone hit the hands of consumers, and they are all quickly coming to find their reliance on none other than the Mobile Web.
Just days after the launch, and even before the launch, scores of iPhone-centric sites were popping up, including the iPhone version of Digg and the slick suite of Leaflets from the guys at Blue Flavor. Now, a month later, there seems to be an iPhone site for almost everything, from reading various newspapers to tracking your fuel mileage.
Why would iPhone users, with a mobile web browser that can parse and cleanly display full-size web pages, gravitate toward these special sites, which often have a more limited feature set and a more ordinary appearance?
The answer is context. Content is still important, but context is king on a mobile device. If you have a device, like the iPhone, with a small screen, a limited ability to enter lots of text, and a slow or latent connection, the last thing you want is to have to zoom around different parts of a page, type in a load of text, or wait while twenty-odd connections finish loading your one page.
Instead, you typically want to complete a specific task, and don’t want extraneous “features” or “information” to get in the way of making it happen. Let’s pretend you live in the DC area, even if you don’t, and you want to take the Metro. On an iPhone, you have to wade past news headlines, advertisements, and links to information about the Board of Directors before finding the route planner. Then, you have to type in your origin and destination with the on-screen keyboard. Once you submit, assuming you typed correctly, you wade past that other info again to find the next train.
Compare this with their mobile site (which doesn’t work on the iPhone, since it’s old-school WAP, but should work on other mobile phones) or the iPhone-centric Meenster. Within three finger- or key-presses, and no input or scrolling, you can find the same information. These sites recognize the limitations of the mobile platform—even the iPhone—and provide a user experience that helps you do what you came to the site to do as easily as possible.
Rather than make the Mobile Web irrelevant, the iPhone has instead done just the opposite: mobile applications are more relevant than ever, and iPhone users are quickly choosing to use services that have chosen to offer sites that provide them with a better user experience.
When considering whether or not the investment in a mobile-centric site is worth it for your company or project, consider two quick questions:
- Would someone using a mobile device have a reason to need your service immediately?
- Does the information needed require a form to access, or is it found more than one click into the site?
If so, you probably have a significant audience that would be better served by a site tailored to mobile, and when you serve users’ needs quickly and effectively, they’re not only going to come back, but they’ll do your evangelizing for you.
The Mobile Web isn’t dead: it’s just getting started.
I don’t think that context is the biggest contributing factor to the rise in iPhone optimized sites.
First, the EDGE connection is WAY to slow. WiFi isn’t something that you can depend on, especially in DC. Have you tried loading a normal Web site on your iPhone? Developers have to make mobile versions of their site that are smaller and take less time to load.
Also… the version of WebKit available on the iPhone has much better Web standards support than a lot of browsers. There is some cool CSS3 support with it.
http://westciv.com/iphonetests/
In order to use these features, which aren’t supported by any of the mainstream browsers, you have to make a specific version of the site for the iPhone.
The slow EDGE connection is the biggie. If it didn’t take so long to load a normal Web page, I’d have no problem accessing it in a mobile context.
Justin, I agree with you that EDGE is incredibly slow and that WebKit supports normal websites to a pretty good extent.
But I think you’re missing that network speed and latency is a major part of the mobile context, and is not separate from it. If you’re developing a site for mobile, one of the first things you want to do is ensure that the size of the download is small. It doesn’t matter whether or not it’s EDGE, 3G, 2.5G, or whatever: mobile networks are slow, and mobile sites need to recognize that as part of the mobile context.
I think that even if wifi-speed access were available almost everywhere, iPhone users would still have a tendency toward mobile-specific sites, though it may not be quite as strong. Those sites that don’t require scrolling/zooming and recognize that input is somewhat difficult would be more appealing than those that ignore those two factors.
Richard MacManus over at Read/Write Web has got a good article on this.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/iphone_vs_mobile_web.php
I’ve been working on the mobile web for a while now - a few major news sites - and even with the iPhone, the key is the interface. Justin nails it when he says limited UI.
On a standard web site, you get a huge amount of garbage… bad js, ads, bad layering, flash, etc, etc. On most mobile sites, there are 1-2 ads and they’re usually unobtrusive and not making noise, etc.
Even better (worse?) since the rendering is often quite weak, designers focus on providing content instead of flash.
Oh, and there’s little of that too. ;)
First, I’ll preface that I am by no means as fluent as you guys are on UI design (context) and apps development, so I’ll contribute from a protocol and network perspective since that’s what I do. I agree that context and contents have to work together to make any solution work in today’s society, I mean can you imagine looking at a Facebook page on a 2400 baud modem?! Yet, I believe there are disconnect between context & content and wireless characteristic that I think Jackson has highlighted above.
The ‘ground-based’ network that connects all of us to the World Wide Web has far outpaced the wireless space. VZ had made a big hedge with their FiOS offerings and it’s still growing. As a result, the throughput feeds the need for better, greater, more robust contents, and as new languages and tool gets more sophisticated which challenges the network to provide greater speed and quality of service (QoS); and the cycle continues. In the wireless sector, it’s a bit different and there’s no direct comparison between the two access medium; it’s just, well, different. Data are transmitted via wave propagation attempting to meet the same QoS as the ‘ground-based’ network but it’s challenged mainly by multipaths (terrains such as indoor, outdoor, urban, foliage, etc.) and mobility (i.e., Doppler effect, hand-off between base-stations). On the business side, there’s the cost to build an infrastructure and/or the bidding prices for new piece of spectrum in the billion dollars range. Lastly, there are policies that create limitation and sometime barrier that technology can easily resolve (or cross the line depending on one’s perspective). For example, the upcoming auction of the 700 mhz spectrum where one of its goal is to open up for competition so not only devices are interoperable between networks, but contents and applications are ‘transferable’ as well. I say utopian because incumbents such as Verizon, AT&T, and other big teleco provider are going to resist; except maybe with Sprint/Nextel that’s taking the tack on WiMAX which is a new protocol with high throughput.
But enough about wireless and get back on track a bit… To get “mobile web” on par with the ‘ground-based’ infrastructure I described above, I believe content/context developers, wireless network solution providers, policy makers, and of course the investor (at the end, it’s all about $$$). For example, an ‘intermediate solution’ I like are tools such as Google Gears; hosted apps such as Google Doc is great (i.e., collaboration, latest version readily available), but what if you want to work on it on a plane. Until companies such as Wi-SKY or Aeromobile can launch their services into the mass G’Gears is a great way to bridge this gap. Location-based Services is another neat area with mobile devices, but the challenge is the ability to find a balance content/context with appropriate QoS from its wireless network.
In all, I don’t think there’s one silver bullet that can ‘speed up’ the mobile space over night. Yet I do think that all parties (policy, technology, contents/context) have to understand each other’s needs and limitation and work toward a solution. It might not be a Well-Done solution, but a medium-rare is better than nothing at all (sorry, I didn’t have breakfast yet)
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