Erik Scholz    

Why Using iPhone Optimized Websites Over Native iPhone Apps

Today I was blown away by mobile Safari’s capabilities that I started showing around some examples of top-notch mobile websites. I received some “Nice. So?” and no “Wow, amazing, incredible!”. After that I felt to straighten up the facts about mobile web applications. Though most of these stunning mobile Safari capabilities are out there for years I never gave them any attention.

First of all I’d like to show some examples of mobile websites demonstrating features of cutting edge mobile web with a focus on mobile safari:

• Horizontal scrolling navigation + pageflip (press about button on the upper right-hand corner): http://iphone.jiwire.com/
• GPS + pinchnavigation: http://m.google.com/maps
• Coverflow: http://css-vfx.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/examples/zflow.html
• Drag&drop, turn (with two fingers), change outline and color: http://o.sitepen.com/labs/code/iphone/events.html
• Simple 3d: http://girliemac.com/sandbox/flickr_3d.html
• Animated text and color: http://webkit.org/blog-files/pulse.html

Truly these are mostly just gimmicks at first. But brought together intelligently we are talking about powerful elements to be combined into useful, funny, responsive and modern web apps.

The next question is why should this technology be used for any kind of application? We have native applications for the iPhone and we could wait for the missing flash plugin. But there’s couple of reasons to avoid these two.

Web Apps Pros

• There are way more developers out there capable of creating web apps than coders for native apps.
• Higher competition, lower labour costs.
• You don’t have to worry about changes of iPhone OS. Sometimes a whole application needs to be reprogrammed after that. Costs lots of time and money.
• You don’t have to care about the App Store approval process. Imagine you (let) develop a million dollar app for that big shot client. In the end you just wanna push that into the store to get your client popular or rich or both. And some App Store approvers just reject your app because of massively NSFW content. Everybody is screwed. Everybody is happy with a web app.
• You will be faster at your consumer or user. As soon as you put your app online it’s out there (the cloud u know?). No need to wait for any blood pressure raising approval. Same for surely upcoming updates or bugfixes. Any change won’t be immediatly at our audience. Again we and the users need to wait for approval.
• If the app needs to be running on other devices (even if all those blackberries, windows phones whatever are crap - spreading is good for business) that’s done quickly. It’s just small changes in the code and it will be running on every smartphone, ipad, pc, mac or linux-geek-machine. You name it.
• You could easily take the whole content of an existing website and just wrap some iphone specific code around that and ready is your web app.

Web App Cons

• Easy App Store payment system will be missing
• Some features like fast 3d or using the camera won’t be available

As proven by companies like Facebook, Amazon or Google it’s cool to have an native App. But that’s expensive to develop and rather hard to spread through the jungle of digital devices. They all have a mobile website for their services. And these websites always have new features available quicker than any native app. And there’s loads of app store applications where I can just see no need because they don’t use features unique features like the mentioned camera.

To summarize web apps are sustainable, convenient, adaptable, profitable and most of all when there’s some good software designers even sexy.

02/18/2010 ≈ 11:51PM