Neil Middleton
One web, one app
At Kyan we’re getting more and more requests for mobile application development. This is pretty unsurprising as you may expect given that lots of people now have smartphones in their pockets more powerful than the computers that sent man to the moon.
Whilst this isn’t a use case that we’ve had just yet, we do get a lot of requests asking for mobile versions of existing applications to be created, or entirely new mobile-only applications to be built. One of the principal questions that always pops up is the one of which mobile platform the build should be aimed at. Clients are always interested in knowing which is the most popular and has the most reach, both now and in the future.
Choices, choices
Apple’s i(Phone/Pad/Pod Touch) has been battling Google’s Android, Apple has been battling with Adobe over Flash, and then there’s the patent wars between Apple, Google, HTC and Microsoft.
It’s a pretty tough one to call.
So, what do we developers do? From a business point of view you want your applications to work on as many platforms as possible to maximise the ‘attack surface’ in the various markets out there and gain the most revenue.
They’re all very different beasts too – Apple have their draconian approval process, but provide the class leading App Store, whereas Google is all about free-love and sell it how you want. Apple have iOS and in-roads into the Apple Mac store. Google have Android and availability across all sorts of carriers and phone manufacturers. And that’s before you even start to think about RIM, WebOS and others.
The list goes on.
So how are we supposed to navigate through this minefield of options? Well, it’s pretty simple actually:
Ignore it.
Every mobile phone manufacturer is striving to produce a browser on their phone that can view the whole web in a similar way to a desktop computer, and all are striving to support the latest and greatest. Therefore, surely the easiest way for us web developers to bring an application to a phone is to simply look at it through a browser?
Picture this, you have an application out there in the wild, you want it to work on the iPhone, so use Safari – job done. It’ll also most likely work on Android with no changes, and is also not dependant on Apple’s approval or anything else, you can do it how you want. Additionally, with libraries like JQTouch you can access phone hardware should you want to.
But OK, this isn’t ideal for all situations. You won’t have offline access as such, you won’t be able to build games, and you won’t get amazing performance – but for the most part, that’s not a big trade off for most business focused applications.
However, it’s always good to have the ability to ‘get native’ if needs be and that’s why it’s also important to maintain the skills to develop whatever you need for when the need does arise. Just remember that for the vast majority of cases, web apps work just fine across all platforms. This is why at Kyan we always make sure to retain these skills for when we need to take that extra step.
So, in short, most people can forget about the popularity and reach of the various mobile platforms out there as it’s not something you need worry about when building for the web browser, we are already expert in the single tool that will make our app truly cross platform – the good old world wide web…
Tags: web, webapplications, microsoft, apple, adobe, mobile
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