Mobile applications vs Mobile Web
I have been doing web-stuff for the last years (currently as CTO of Nulaz), so it’s safe to say I like everything webbased.However, for Nulaz, we have chosen to develop a mobile application, instead of a mobile website. I have been in a lot of discussions about this, both within our company, and with others. Today I read a discussion, saying that mobile application development is dead, and webdevelopment is the way to go.
I would love to only develop webbased stuff. However, I think two things are missing from the mobile web which currently leads us (as in: my company) to still focus on mobile application development.
Those two things are:
- Device access. Mobile phones have some unique capabilities that can add to the user experience (photo’s, LBS, etc). This access currently isn’t possible from a browser.
- User interface issues. For example, a scrolling map (like every other webpage has with the google maps API), isn’t currently possible in a mobile browser. Every scoll action will require selecting a link, clicking it, and reloading the page, instead of just pressing left or right.
For these reasons we currently develop our applications as an application, but I would love to see these two barriers disappear, and be able to “just” devellop a mobile site: The segmentation just within Java quite sucks.
I’m confident these two issues will eventually be fixed. But because we want to build something that runs today, and not only your next device, but also on your mom’s current phone, we will be working on our application for a while.
Let me know when your 6230 (the phone pictured above, and the one my mom uses) can run mobile ajax stuff, but untill then, I guess I’m stuck with the J2ME.
