In Part One we examined what I call the Four Lies of Mobile. But now it's time to focus on the apps vs browser battle.
At the moment I see a pretty clear division: in the US market, apps seem to be winning because the brand of choice is Apple (iPad and iPhone).
There is some research kicking about. Zorkem, a Finish company who specializes in mobile, conducted several surveys in 2009 and 2010 which paint a reasonably good picture of the situation.
But a rather US-centric view from pundits such as Chris Anderson of Wired sees the market as all about apps.
Indeed, at a recent media conference one group went as far as to say that it had become an app world. But this is not the case, as the Zokem data shows.
We are not going to see a clear winner in the apps versus browser debate - both have their place. And with a lack of consistency around user experience, the need for both will remain.
Venturing outside the tunnel vision of many US commentators, in other parts of the world apps have not taken hold - mobile browsing seems to be fine.
Therefore it is fair to say that the ascendancy of one over the other tends to be very specific to a country. This is often due to the nature of the mobile operators in each market, and subsequently determining the device.
So the battle is coming down to an interesting conundrum:
- Lack of easy search functionality...
- ...counteracted by the ease of development via the HTML5 platform...
- ...versus the ubiquity and consistency of the iPhone environment...
- ...plus the ability to make apps ideal for the business environment.
This is giving a far more complex battle than existed in the early PC wars.
Consider, then, multiple tiers of the problem:
- Network protocol (old generation - CDMA, GSM etc, new generation WCDMA and LTE)
- Network Operator the global big 3/4 (Vodaphone, TMobile, Orange, Telefonica plus local players etc etc)
- Device OS (the big 4+).
- Device provider the absolute plethora.
- Customized versions designed to place you in prison.
- Apps and App Stores.
- Browsers/UEX.
This is a far more complicated environment to handle than ever existed in the PC world.
Another issue is that the plethora of apps is making the use of appropriate products for any particular environment and application harder because the use of apps wanes rapidly due to lack of consistent use.
Perhaps this is why Angry Birds attracted $42 million in investor money. It is one of the few really sticky apps.
When one looks at the three leading players, what is the average number of apps downloaded? According to Nielsen, which conducted a survey among 4,000 mobile subscribers, the iPhone not surprisingly led the pack with users downloading an average of 40 apps. Android came in second with 25 downloads per device, and BlackBerry was in third with an average of 14.
And security? There is a lot of bad stuff out there.
With Android Apps security often leaving a little to be desired, iPhone might still be the better option for security than the Google Mobile OS.
Advanced services in mobile
There are two major elements that are driving better mobile services. One is the location of the user, the other being the ability to interact with a local service through a ubiquitous tool.
For the former, Location Based Services (LBS) are another area where the faithful believe they have found the promised land. I caution you to remember what happened to the last lot of people who tried to do that.
I seem to recall they got lost for 40 years! Joking aside. LBS has the power to provide context. However it also has the power to provide ultra spamming.
LBS should be seen as a valuable context to those applications that can take advantage of the location information. But I have seen far too many LBS-based apps in a non-LBS environment make them completely useless.
On the other side of the spectrum, there are a number of very simple services that provide value to the consumer based on pure SMS.
With the latter, the emergence of QR codes has enabled a local context environment on a smartphone. The advances of social-based apps such as FourSquare, not to mention the various flavours of Google’s and Facebook’s services, have allowed mobile services to work effectively.
I am sure there are a significant number of people who are claiming that mobile is great are now mad at reading these two pieces.
I would ask them to take a long and deep look at the current state of affairs - address as much as you can with the tools and think of the entire spectrum of service from the consumers point of view. We need to break out mobile services for travel.
The drivers for mobile are clearly in place. Infrastructure is getting better (despite my protestations as to the state of the networks etc). The device explosion has happened.
The downside is that there are certain companies who are being, shall we say, greedy? I have spoken loudly and often about the evils of Apple’s business model for the iPhone - King Gillette must think that Steve Jobs is his direct progeny.
Just count the number of revenue streams that now are heading towards Apple as a result of the iPhone, the latest of which is a "tax" on streaming via the iPhone for media services such as Pandora. Apple’s refusal to support push email because they don’t want to pay a license fee to RIM has cost users probably hundreds of millions of dollars.
The battle is now deep and broad. There will be many casualties and the cost to the consumer will remain high.
Just because Joe Public has to pay for it now does not mean he should, nor that he will in the future.
So my supposition of what will be happen in the travel app marketplace is actually not a happy state of affairs... for now.
There are no major standout apps for travel that have emerged. What is missing for the travel category is an Angry Birds or an iTunes type of travel app.
Travel as a category can and should do better. C’mon boys and girls. Let’s show them what we can do.
NB: The Zokem study is based on patented non-parametric measurements that take place directly in smartphones. In the study, Zokem analysed a dataset of more than 10,000 smartphone users, including 6.5 million distinct smartphone usage sessions in 16 countries during 2009 and 2010.