App Stores Are Here To Stay
Fred Wilson wrote, a few days back:
I saw two HTML5 apps yesterday. One running in my Android browser. The other running in the iPad browser. They looked and worked exactly like their mobile app counterparts. It was a mind opening moment.
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I’ve always disliked the idea that we have to download apps on our phones when the apps we use on the web are loaded in the browser on demand. But I’ve accepted the mobile app paradigm as something we will be living with for the next five years.
I’m not sure it’s five years anymore.
As an app developer I hope he is correct but I think he’s perhaps misunderstanding why native apps are so appealing. As far as I see it native applications have three primary benefits: technology, distribution, and monetization.
As far as technology goes, Fred may be right. The number of things you can do in HTML5 will continue to increase. HTML5’s geolocation functionality (already supported on many devices) takes care of one of the big ones.
Unfortunately the one thing you can’t make in HTML5 right now are rich games, which is exactly what people are using. You can make pong, but you can’t make Angry Birds. If and when WebGL is ready for prime time the number of apps you’ll actually need to make native will decrease significantly. I’m always hesitant to put a timeline on standards being finalized and adopted (remember the 802.11n debacle) but 5 years might be realistic for usable WebGL on most major smart phones. I wouldn’t bet on much sooner though, and as long as games are driving what people use the platforms for, which you can always safely bet on, native apps aren’t going to disappear.
However I’m far less hopeful that the other two advantages will disappear in five years. Right now Apple has a huge lead as far as monetization goes, even over Android. The iOS advantage comes from the network of credit cards Apple has stored on their servers. Almost everyone who owns an iOS device has a payment method already in Apple’s database that enables 1-click purchasing. Nothing quite like it exists on the internet in terms of ease of use. PayPal is possibly a viable competitor for Android, Google Checkout seemingly has not been.
And then there’s distribution. Right now a top free app in the app store gets hundreds of thousands of downloads a day. Multiple apps achieve this milestone every week. It’s extremely hard to do this on the web, and it would probably be even harder on the mobile web. There’s no one central place where people can see all of the cool new websites every day, sorted by category, and ranked and reviewed by other users. The App Store is the Amazon of native apps, and there’s just nothing like that for web apps.
Web apps have other distribution methods, of course, that are a mixed bag. Search, recommendations, Facebook/Twitter connect, etc., offer unique advantages and disadvantages over the centralized app store model. But I can’t think of one mobile web app that’s achieved mass market success yet the old-fashioned way. Most mobile web apps are simply extensions of already existing desktop web apps. If anyone is having any success yet trying to change this I have somehow missed hearing about it. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen either, but it’s going to be a long hard slog from here to a world where mobile web apps can compete with native ones for users.
If anything what we’re seeing right now is the opposite of what Fred is predicting, with web apps going native. Apple’s new Mac App Store is trying very hard to push things in the opposite direction. Magazines like Time, Wired, The Economist, and new ones like Project are launching iPad apps that could easily, from a technological perspective have been web apps. They’re doing it for the same advantages of monetization and distribution that native apps enjoy. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see Microsoft do something similar with Windows soon, and if they don’t OEMs will.
As long as Apple remains an influential player, they’ll keep abusing and improving those advantages, especially the last two, and maybe even restricting the technology available to HTML5 to keep control over what’s running on their devices. All Apple has to do to ensure that the majority of apps remain native is not support WebGL and/or Flash.
Apple has strong financial incentives to see a healthy app store. It monetizes directly and it also drives hardware sales. Try as hard as you might, you can’t hammer “there’s an HTML5 app on the web that runs on any phone including ours for that” into a catchy slogan.
