Tyler's Blog - Most mobile apps don't need to exist

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

Most mobile apps don't need to exist

It's time to rant about something that annoys me. Sorry to those of you that have already heard me talk about this ad nauseam.

With the advances in smart phone technology and adoptio, one of the hot areas in software development is iphone (and other smartphone) apps. Apple boasts 50,000 applications in their store. When people hear I have a Pre, they ask if it's ok not having very many apps. I constantly read blog posts and hear want-to-be entrepreneurs talking about making a new iphone app.

Some mobile apps are awesome. 95% of them are stupid (fart, flashlight, and beer apps). 95% of them don't really need to be applications at all (I'll get to this later). Those 95% don't perfectly overlap which makes me want to put the number of useful iphone apps that should actually exist somewhere around one or two percent.

So why shouldn't these apps exist? Because all they do is display data from a website. People are missing the fundamental purpose for installed applications. That purpose is generally to make use of the hardware of the device or to add functionality that a web browser can't support. Having a facebook app doesn't make much sense to me. What can the app do that facebook's mobile website can't?

Granted, a lot of companies have pretty bad mobile sites (facebook included, although Frodo might beg to differ), but maybe they would be better if they didn't spend time making applications for every different phone platform out there.

So once again I wonder, what can the mobile app do that the mobile website can't? Offline mode isn't important for most things. Facebook certainly isn't useful if you don't have an active data connection. So why do you need a Facebook, Fandango, or weather app? They're only useful if you have a data signal and if you do, why not just go online?

The great thing about websites is that they use a universal platform. Making an iphone website is the same as making a blackberry, palm OS, and windows mobile website. Most people don't install a facebook or fandago app on their computer, and the same fundamental principles apply with phones.

So what should be applications? Pandora is a great example. For that matter, anything where the normal website relies on flash needs to be an app since mobile browsers don't support flash yet. So Youtube, Hulu, and online game sites make perfect sense. GPS applications seem to integrate with the phone's hardware more than a browser would support so those apps are legit. Playing music, or anything else that needs to access files stored on the device should be applications.

From what I understand, Google recently came to this realization. For most of their programs, they're just making really killer mobile sites rather than putting more work into downloadable applications. The results are amazing. There aren't many apps for the Pre yet, but I don't really care because Google Reader, Gmail, and Google Tasks all have perfect mobile sites. And even if the Pre did have applications for those tools, why would I use them instead of the mobile sites?

As my brother pointed out, my argument is sound in theory, but sometimes not in practice. He said that his facebook app is much faster than the website. Mobile sites on my phone load in a matter of seconds, so I don't really see this as an issue, but I do realize that an argument could be made that phone hardware and data connections just can't handle life in the cloud.

I realize the argument could be made, but I still disagree with it.

Posted by Tyler King

Tags: Mobile

This post has 5 Comments

Bracken King

July 24, 2009 at 05:18 am

First off, I use the facebook webapp; my comments above are from using Rachel's installed app, so it obviously isn't a big deal for me.

Anyways, I decided to take a look at all of the apps I have installed and see why I still have them. 7 of my 27 installed apps could probably be replaced by websites, because all they provide is a better interface. Of the rest, all of them either play media or need to access the hardware/data on the device in a way that a webapp likely can't. I also have 7 webapps bookmarked on my homepage (all from google), which I probably use as much if not more than any of the installed apps. Here's the run down:

webapps:
google mail
google talk
google reader
google tasks
google books
google notebook
google voice

better interface:
wikipanion - no mobile site (somewhat suprising)
mint - no mobile site (very surprising)
ATT myWireless - no mobile site (absurd)
phoneFlicks (netflix manager) - no mobile site (very surprising)
allRecipes - no mobile site
epicurious - i've never actually used this one
i.tv (tv listings) - mobile web site probably exists (from other provider)

media:
pandora
orb - also has a mobile site which works almost as well
ambiance (white noise app)
mlb.com at bat
weatherBug (video forecasts plus navigable radar map)
tuneWiki (adds lyrics to playing media)

camera/microphone access:
google search - voice search
evernote - camera/microphone integration
midomi - recognizes songs (radio/hummed/etc)

LAN access:
vnc client
itunes remote
xbmc remote
boxee remote
touchTerminal

GPS access:
runkeeper
now playing (movie tickets)
open table (reservations)

contact list access:
GV mobile

notifications:
aim
eBuddy

Tyler King

July 24, 2009 at 09:42 am

That looks like a pretty reasonable list. I assume you use other random web apps whenever you need to (to get movie times for example) rather than downloading an app to do that (as the iphone commercials suggest).

Side note: wikipedia and netflix both have mobile sites now, but the netflix one is pretty weak:
m.netflix.com
m.wikipedia.org

Nathaniel Roman

July 29, 2009 at 01:22 am

I imagine one reason why a lot of companies want release applications, especially for the iphone is that it is much easier to charge for an app in the app store.

People generally think of mobile web content as free but are willing to throw a few bucks out for an app. The app store facilitates this by allowing them to by the app with essentially one click.

This wouldn't explain a lot of the free apps although many of them are lite versions of paid apps.

BTW, Bracken you should check out BeejiveIM, it does push notification for aim, gtalk, icq, jabber, msn, yahoo, and facebook chat. It's a paid app but works really well.

Tyler King

July 29, 2009 at 10:46 am

It's a great point that companies can justify charging for apps. I hadn't thought of that.

However, that doesn't really explain why consumers want the apps in the first place. If facebook offered a downloadable app for your computer, you probably wouldn't use it. You certainly wouldn't use it if they charged for it.

Nathaniel Roman

July 29, 2009 at 11:28 am

I use the facebook app on my phone because it starts more quickly than a website on my phone. Also it integrates with the notifications api on the phone, so that i see when I have pending requests and invitations.

It is true that I would not install a facebook desktop app on my computer, but let's look at a different example: GMail. Do you have gears installed, so that mail is cached on your computer and you can access it without web connectivity?

To me this seems a lot like having the "GMail App" installed on a computer.

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