Mike Brittain

PPK wrote a thought provoking post drawing a parallel between iPhone-specific mobile development and IE6-specific development we saw begin a decade ago and is still, somewhat surprisingly, biting us in the ass.  It’s an important warning to heed, but I think he misses some critical points about mobile web usage trends and dwells too much on a snapshot of current statistics about mobile handset market share.

Why are developers obsessed with the iPhone?

Let’s not mince words.  Mobile web browsing has traditionally been a horrible experience.  I’ve had a couple of what seemed like great smartphones (a BlackBerry 8700 and a Palm Treo 550).  They made me feel like I could use the web, and were better than nothing, but they were still a terrible experience when compared with today’s mobile web.  To deal with the fact that these handsets couldn’t consume all of the image formats, plugins, or even standard HTML produced for the web, the browsers either munged their rendering or made use of proxies that would reformat a web site’s HTML content to be more WAP-ready.  Transfer speeds were also doggedly slow.  It made much of the web accessible, but was a rough ride.

It’s not even worth talking about the people who were making mobile-friendly sites three years ago.  It’s not to say they didn’t exist, but the number of sites customized for mobile browsers at that point is negligible.

The iPhone coming to market changed the game.  Why?  Because Mobile Safari allowed users to see real web sites and not dumbed down version of web pages (well, except for Flash).  Additionally, AT&T contracts for iPhones require data plans.  Most smartphones on the market can be purchased with a contract that doesn’t include web data usage.   I just priced out BlackBerry Tour and Droid Eris (HTC) phones on Verizon and their base package includes no data usage.  You pay an additional $1.99/MB for data transfer.  BlackBerry handsets are huge in the U.S., but they’re simply not for web usage, they’re purchase primarily for email and texting.  (I believe this will change, but RIM needs to massively overhaul their browser architecture to catch up to the current state of mobile browsers being released on other phones.)

The graph below demonstrates the effect of the iPhone on mobile web usage (global).  Click for full size.

Source: Quantcast 2009 Mobile Web Trends Report

I am not advocating that we only design for the iPhone.  Newer mobile operating systems are incorporating WebKit into their default offerings.  Even though the versions of WebKit released on iPhone, Android, Symbian, Palm, etc. differ, they are all starting miles ahead of the mobile browsers from two or three years ago.  If PPK is concerned about developers favoring a technology (as they did IE6), should we be concerned about a dominance of WebKit and an ignorance of everything else?

Trends for mobile web usage

Another problem I have with the article is the statistics that were chosen.  There is too much focus on mobile handset/OS market share and not on mobile web usage.  All of the statistics that PPK chose to show are a snapshot of the current market.  If a web developer took this sort of approach to their web development strategy, they may have concluded in April 2009 that “Internet Explorer 8 only has 3.6% market share, let’s not worry too much about it.” (Source: Net Applications)

Mobile handset/OS market share has no correlation to mobile web usage.  Looking at the stats presented in PPK’s post, Symbian commands 45% of the smartphone market share (I’m fairly sure this is global market share, he made a point of not allowing developers to focus on the U.S. alone).  Contrast that with Quantcast’s 2009 Mobile Web Usage Report which shows that Symbian makes up just over 3% of global mobile web usage (all handsets included).

This graph, again from Quantcast’s 2009 report, demonstrates the mobile web market share (global) of the top handset operating systems. Click to enlarge.

Source: Quantcast 2009 Mobile Web Trends Report

Bottom line: The mobile web is tiny

There’s one more point I want to make, also supported by Quantcast’s report.  Statistics on mobile phone usage and mobile web penetration by market can get pretty heady.  It’s exciting to see all of this growth in mobile.  But the fact is that despite all of the people in the world walking around with their mobile phones, they’re not yet consuming very much of the web.  According to Quantcast, by the end of 2009 mobile web usage accounts for just 0.95% of total web usage worldwide.

Much respect

To be clear, my intention is not to bash PPK. His research, code samples, and compatibility tables are invaluable to the web development community.  I know I’ve used them countless times.  Many thanks!

I also agree with his overall rant, which is that building iPhone-specific sites is a dumb approach.  I hope to write more on that soon.

Additional resources and data

I’ve put a lot of emphasis on numbers I found in a Quantcast report.  Their findings are based on a pixel-based measurement of web usage and report only from sites where their instrumentation is deployed. Concerns I have are whether their measurements are effective on all mobile browsers (including those using transcoding proxies), and whether their measurements would be skewed by higher deployment of their pixels on sites in one global region over others.  It seems, however, that most of the best known operating systems are represented.

I didn’t call out any of the numbers from the AdMob report (listed below) because I don’t believe an ad serving network would have solid coverage of the mobile web, especially not on a global scale.

Below are some additional resources worth reviewing which I read while researching these trends.

Mobile Metrics Report, Dec 2009 – AdMob

State of the Mobile Web, Sept 2009 – Opera

The Mobile Internet Report, Dec 2009 – Morgan Stanley

I was excited to read this article about mobile web sites growing faster than native apps, a trend I believe will continue in the future.

Taptu estimates that there are 326,000 Mobile Touch Web sites worldwide, which they say compares to 148,000 iPhone apps in the App Store and 24,000 apps in the Android market. Taptu expects the browser-based mobile web market to grow much faster than the app market.

I’m excited about browser-based apps and the potential of HTML5 as a platform for cross-platform app development.  It’s too bad there’s not a distinction in these numbers between web applications and content sites that simply have layouts customized for display on mobile devices.

Mobile-Friendly, Web Apps, and Native Apps

When the iPhone was launched, Safari became the first mobile browser to really represent web sites as you would see them on a desktop browser.  Before then, surfing from your phone’s browser was a clunky experience with unsupported HTML and CSS features, and web proxies that would reformat or strip out content deemed unfriendly for the mobile browser.  On rare occasions, you might stumble into a site that would push your phone’s browser to a version of the site formatted specifically for display on a small screen.  Today, the term “web app” gets confused with “mobile-friendly” web sites.  I say they are wholly different products.

Native apps are touted for their advantages over web-based apps, which include: 1. better exposure to hardware- or platform-specific APIs, 2. potential for instant revenue streams (payment via app stores), and 3. ability to operate in an offline capacity.

It’s difficult to argue against native apps and games that tie into platform-specific APIs unavailable to web apps.  However, there are plenty of services available for making payments to web sites, but developers need to keep in mind their competition in native apps.  You can’t charge $5/month for access to your web app when a similar app sells for a one-time $0.99 fee through an app store.  Finally, the point of offline access is fairly ironic given that so many native apps are simply wrappers for network APIs and cannot run without a network connection.

So when I talk about web apps, I don’t just mean a mobile-friendly web site.  Rather, I’m talking about the potential to build rich applications that can run in a browser.  Using HTML5 capabilities like offline data storage and object caches, web apps can mimic many of the same features built in native apps but have the ability to reach across platforms and devices.

My own definition of web app an application that:

1. Is written with core web technologies and runs in a browser,
2. Provides more utility than simply reading pages of content,
3. Is responsive to user interaction and gives the same impression that an installed app gives, and
4. Is device and platform independent, indeed it should be irrelevant whether it is displayed on a mobile phone, a desktop computer, or any other device.

The Web App Findability Problem

Platform-specific app stores have risen up as clearing houses for apps. Users are being conditioned that the term “app” means something you download and install on your phone.  App stores are backed by big marketing dollars and ad campaigns because they provide a competitive advantage for their platform and create new revenue streams.  Web apps, on the other hand, provide neither.

There are online directories of web apps to solve this problem, but these don’t have nearly the visibility or marketing of today’s app stores.  It would be difficult for consumers to even consider web apps when they have a nice, easy shortcut to their platform’s app store built right into their phone. Even Apple, who claimed at the release of the first iPhone that web applications were enough, do not provide a means for finding web apps from their phone.  Indeed, their own web app directory doesn’t render in a mobile-friendly format.

Visibility is a key barrier for web apps.

Where Will Web Apps Get Their Exposure?

I’ve thought over a few possibilities for building the web app market, which are outlined here.

First, app stores could expand their listings to include web apps. There are already plenty of free apps in the stores.  Web apps would not create any new low price points.  I see business concerns with this direction, though.  App stores have their own services to charge for paid apps at the point of purchase.  A web app is never downloaded, so it is difficult to charge a toll for access.  Furthermore, web apps might require subscriptions or usage fees, but would be open to choose from a variety of payment gateways.  Owners of app stores would likely see this as losing out.

Search engines could provide niche listings for web applications in the same manner that news, shopping and image search reasults are handled by Google.  Search engines are supposed to provide unbiased rankings and could probably fit an app directory well.

The last idea would be to identify web applications using a new “.app” top-level domain, similar to the .mobi TLD used for mobile compatible sites.  The term “app” has already become part of the vernacular and its use as a TLD could easily identify a URL as a pointer to an application (desktop or mobile) as opposed to just mobile-friendly web pages.

I started playing around with Safari’s CSS gradients yesterday to see whether they would be usable on One tsp.’s mobile interface.  Looks like there has been support in WebKit for about a year now, but I don’t know specifics about how that translates to versions of Safari and other browsers built on top of WebKit.

The demos seemed to work for me in Safari 4 and in the latest version of mobile Safari built into the iPhone 3.0 OS.  I tested the 2.0 OS and it did not support gradients. I don’t know what support the Palm Pre browser has available.

This looked good enough for me, through.  Much of the interface for One tsp. is already taking advantage of a few CSS extensions with varying support.  The interface looks its best on modern browsers (IE excluded) but is still totally usable everywhere else.

So what’s the difference?

I’ve only replaced one gradient background so far, but I’m stunned.  By defining the gradient in CSS, I’ve added just 92 bytes to my style sheet.  This allowed me to remove the background-image rule I had in place to load an image file, which was 50 bytes.  The image file that is no longer needed was pretty small (635 bytes) but also meant another external request that needed to be made.  When we’re talking about a mobile device, extra requests can have a high latency — worse than what we typically think of for the web.

These are pretty small numbers, I’ll admit.  But assuming I have six gradients defined per page, the net savings would be trading around 4 KB and six additional requests for about 260 bytes and no additional requests.  That’s pretty cool.

Faster Mobile Interfaces

Successful mobile web applications need to be super fast. Users trading a native app for a web app will expect it to be responsive. Speed can be improved through faster server responses, low mobile network latency (which we have little control over), fewer and smaller requests to the server, and cacheability on as much content as possible.

Rounded corners and background gradients are two frequently used interface styles that can now be achieved directly in the browser using CSS, eliminating the need for many additional image requests.

PC Magazine has an article on how mobile upgrades should be done (how Apple is getting it right).  This is something that has really ticked me off about other mobile operating systems, and why I think a lot of web application developers will tend to choose the iPhone as a platform of choice.  With Apple/iPhone, I can develop using (desktop) Safari as a test environment and open up the SDK to test mobile Safari with faith that my app is going to run well on any of the millions of iPhones in the wild.  That’s because the “wild” for iPhones is not all that wild.  It’s actually pretty standard.

Compare that to BlackBerry.  When someone asks me, “does One tsp. (my recipe app) work on a BlackBerry,” I have to say, “well, that depends.”  I’ve basically given BlackBerry users the stripped-down version of my mobile site because to support BlackBerry means supporting a whole range of BlackBerry web browsers that have been created over the last three years, or so.  If RIM upgraded their browsers on each of their mobile devices when new versions became available, then maybe we’d have a platform I could support.

If anyone has tips or suggestions for testing web applications across different versions of BlackBerry browsers, I would love to hear from you in the comments, or find me on twitter at @mikebrittain.

Mobile browsers are really coming along.  Mobile Safari is built on top of WebKit and has just as much capability as the desktop version.  Same with Android’s browser.  Blackberry’s browser, I understand, has improved tremendously over previous versions.  The new offering from Palm centers application development around web technologies HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

As more applications and data grow to live in the cloud, then access to them via a browser must be easy and fast, which is often not the case with data on mobile devices.  A web site can take many seconds to several minutes to load all of the content required.  And at the heart of many sites these days lie some common elements — JavaScript libraries.

Personally, I have avoided heavy-weight libraries for mobile application development, because I know that they are a burden to the end-user.  This is less often the case for desktop users, who typically have broadband connections at home or at work.  So what do we do to improve this situation?

I propose that the mobile browser makers (or OS makers, in most cases) embed standard versions of common JavaScript libraries within their browsers.  Google already makes a number of these available as a hosted solution for web application developers: jQuery, YUI, Prototype, script.aculo.us, etc.  Other players, particularly in the CDN space, could also become involved in hosting these frameworks.  Nearly half of the libraries that Google hosts are larger than the 25 KB cache limit in mobile Safari (for example).  By embedding a handful of these libraries, mobile browsers could speed up some of the overhead of mobile applications that rely on Ajax or heavy DOM manipulation.

How would you do this?  Likely by inspecting HTTP requests by URL.  Google’s hosted libraries include version numbers, which allows developers to peg their work to a specific version, not having to worry about quirks in future versions that could upset their apps.  When an application makes use of one of these embedded libraries, the browser can simply execute the JavaScript library without having to make an external request.  If the application uses a newer version that is not embedded in the browser, the HTTP request would proceed as normal.  End users would get a slower experience than with an embedded framework, but that experience would be no worse than we have now.

I’m interested in hearing others’ thoughts about this idea.

I was in a conversation the other day about mobile platforms and the topic of Android, Google’s mobile OS, came up.  The general outlook was: new, interesting, but too few devices to be concerned about.

I’ve read a modest amount of material about Android, but the sense I have is that Google is at the tip of the iceberg right now.  Sure, only one device has been rolled out to date, and only through T-Mobile (bleegch).  But more devices seem to be in the works, currently abroad, but certainly more in the United States soon.

The thing that is interesting, however, is that this is an OS that is (or can be) geared for devices other than cell phones, including netbooks, TVs, and kitchen appliances.  It has great reach potential, which has not been demonstrated (yet) by other players.  That is something to be considered by developers who are thinking about the next big mobile application to develop — because you might just find yourself playing Scrabble on your fridge while you’re waiting for the water to boil.

TechWeb announced their Mobile Connect conference, which I’m playing a very small part in helping to organize.  The call for speakers is currently open through Jan 31 if you’re interested in being a part.

I recently did some research on the web addresses (or, host names) that companies use for their mobile web sites.  Turns out, there are quite a few varieties.  That isn’t helping anyone who is trying to find on of these sites on their phone, which can be a painful experience as typing is more difficult and network latency (for mobile) is high.

This all stems from a discussion I was having recently about one company in particular who uses the subdomain “pda” for their mobile web site.  “pda” seems to be somewhat of an outdated name for mobile devices.  I’m not even sure that the “pda” subdomain was ever in vogue.

What I came to understand is that the term “pda” was used heavily by the company, maybe stemming from internal use.  I’ve seen this sort of thing happen before — corporate vernacular turns into marketing speak.  Often, the only people who understand the lingo are inside the company.  On their own web site, this company referred to their mobile site as their “mini browser”.  For me, a “browser” is a piece of software and not a web site.

I initially assumed that “m.example.com” and “example.mobi” were becoming the heavy favorites in this area.  When I started digging around, I also found some other URLs that turned up frequently: “mobile.example.com”, “example.com/mobile”, “www.example.com/m”, “iphone.example.com”.  The last is obviously device-specific, but worth noting.

The term “wap” is also used by some companies in their hostnames (“wap.example.com”).  It stands for “wireless application protocol”.  This is not very consumer-friendly acronym, and should be avoided.

I also looked at a list of “top mobile domains” (I forget where I found this) and the sites that came up were:

• m.google.com  (google.com/m and google.com/mobile are also used for some of their mobile services)
• m.twitter.com
• m.cnn.com
• m.flickr.com
• m.yahoo.com
• m.myspace.com
• wap.aol.com/moviefone/  (I don’t know how anyone would guess this one)
• restaurantrow.com/avantgo  (“avantgo” was one of the original mobile products back in 1998-ish)
• mobile.answers.com
• foreca.mobi
• weather.mobi  (also hails under “xhtml.weather.com”, which is another terrible acronym to use in a domain name)

Notice some of the trends here?

The mobile industry is still quite young.  Usage of mobile sites is on the rise.  To be found, companies need to make sure they select the right URLs for their mobile sites.  Help out your customers — don’t buck the trend.  Additionally, you should be casting your net wide.  It’s not technically difficult to pick up three of four of these URLs and forward them to your primary URL (and I don’t care what your IT department says, it’s not).

My guess is that within two years, you’ll see 90% of mobile sites operating under “m.example.com” or “mobile.example.com” (“m” being short, it’s easier to type on a little bitty keyboard).  These will stick with consumers the same way that they figured out what URLs were back in the ’90s.  Remember the first time you saw “http://” somewhere and thought, what the hell does that mean?

With any luck, I’ll be able to find your mobile web site in one guess of the address.

mobiThinking put together a panel of mobile marketers to review some of today’s top mobile sites. Their reviews and quotes provide a lot of good insight for anyone building a mobile presence.

Best and Worst of the Mobile Web

The Economist is running an article on netbooks, with specific advice on sticking to Linux as the operating system — rather than buying a beefy netbook that can run Windows.  I’ve been trying to avoid looking at these for a long time, thinking that when I get one, it will probably be an Apple.  But alas, Apple doesn’t have a netbook or tablet computer yet, and it’s difficult to predict when that will become available.

The sub-$500 price tags make current netbooks relatively cheap in my mind, and potentially disposable should the technology improve significantly in the coming months.  Much harder to call a $1500 computer “disposable”.

Most of what I would want to do with a netbook is pretty much what you should expect to do on a netbook: surf the web, send email, open documents and spreadsheets, and maybe some very lightweight development — which is, for me, typically Linux-based work.  Email and web can already be done well in a browser.  More of my own docs and spreadsheets are in a browser now, too, by using Google Docs.

And, hell, from what I can tell, Google’s “Chrome” web browser (along with its suite of web products) is the play for making the browser more important than the operating system.

It might be time to start taking a closer look at these.