The Future of Mobile Apps

TechnoparkToday.com >> It has been a mad showering of apps in mobile app stores, be it iTunes or Google Play or any other similar stores for the past so many years. Apps could be free or paid, with or without authentication, native or cross platform, with or without multimedia, and so on. How many apps have been deployed in stores so far ? millions and millions !! and how many are in pipeline..? My question is, is this count going to increase in coming years, with so many brands and variants of devices going to flood the market? Are companies going to develop more and more apps and distribute them through the stores? My answer would be a big NO. Will you be surprised if I make a blanket statement saying that these downloadable apps are going to slowly die off? For those who did not expect a NO, let me put forward my justifications. It is definitely going to be a fight between mobile web and downloadable mobile apps, and I foresee mobile web will be a clear winner soon, if not now. Reasons are many.

How many apps will a user download and install in his mobile? If you ask me, it would not be more than 15-20 at a time. He/she is going to install and use whatever is currently hot in the market. Tomorrow, if another app catches his/her attention, he/she is going to install this new one. While doing this exercise, some of the existing apps may be uninstalled. Nobody is going to keep on installing new and new applications in terms of thousands or even hundreds in his mobile handset for sure. Do you agree? If firm X conquers the market with a mind-blowing app, all are going to go behind this, install it and start using it. But, only until another firm Y introduces a better app in the market. It does not matter whether the app is a pure native app or a cross platform app. They are going to go to bin in a matter of months.

Why didn’t Mobile web catch the eye atleast until now? There were so many limitations: inability to access device features, limitations in UI capabilities, limitations of browsers and so on..Are they really problems now? NO in my opinion. With the latest powerful web technologies, it has become really difficult to differentiate between a native or web experience now.

What about the difficulties in opening up and typing a long URL in a browser? With all the browsers coming up with its own favourites list or app launch pad, this has become a problem of the past. So, are you all going to invest in re-writing all of your web apps to mobile web? No no..the quick thing is to exploit the powerful responsive UI design to update the UI layet so that it fits into any device with any resolution. Yes, I am talking about HTML5 and CSS