Michael Mace argues that they are, and that they have been “crushed by a fragmented market and restrictive business practices“- and from my experience I would have to agree.
Various manufacturers, such as Nokia, have made moves towards open source mobile applications, with exciting possibilities opened up by the development of a web server that runs on your mobile phone, and porting of the Python and Perl programming languages to the Symbian operating system. This opens up many opportunities for application developers, but until there is some kind of standard adopted across all mobile phone manufacturers, it is a largely futile exercise.
How many times have you installed a mobile application on your phone to find out that it doesn’t work after the second run? Fring worked perfectly on my Nokia E51 the first time I ran it, but after that it crashed my phone every time. Google Maps does run almost flawlessly on my Nokia, but it crashes my wife’s Blackberry Pearl every time. How long until the speeds of 3G and HSDPA enable mobile browsers to run mobile web 2.0 applications? Both the AJAX in Google maps, and the web version of Google Talk work perfectly on my PC browser, so it’s not too big a stretch to imagine this working on a mobile browser too.
It’s perfectly logical that, just as the Google Docs and Zoho offices of this world start taking over the PC-based web, their convenience and ease of use will spread to mobiles and PDAs also. Why download a flaky mobile web application with all the hassles of installation and crashing, etc when you can use a decent native phone browser to access the exact same functionality?
The overarching question is when, not if, the mobile web will overtake mobile applications. I’d be willing to bet that Google’s Android platform will give us a good indication when we start seeing phones with operating systems based on Android.
