Aaron Maxwell is founder of mobile web design agency Mobile Web Up. You can find him on the agency’s mobile business blog, where he writes about mobile and social media.
Almost every business is gearing up their mobile strategy. No secret why: Mobile is really taking off. There are already more people on the planet who communicate with text messages than with e-mail and more people who own phones than have credit cards, according to the latest statistics.
The difficulty is that there are many facets of mobile technology. Apps, websites and SMS form the broad foundation. But mobile payments and advertising are rich topics on their own. Where do you focus first?
For many companies, the answer has been “an iPhone app” (notice I said iPhone app, not mobile app. More on that later). But people have also been looking into mobile-optimized websites. That has led to a kind of debate in some circles about which is more important. If you’re going to only do one, is it better to make a mobile app or a mobile website?
Apps have one clear advantage. In general, a well-made app can provide a far better user experience than even the best mobile websites are capable of right now. I don’t think this is controversial.
Really, though, what I often see missing from such discussions is cost. It’s often not that hard to make a web app that will work well on most smartphones (depending on the nature of the app — things like graphics-intensive games being an exception, etc.).
But making just a native iPhone app is usually harder than making an equivalent cross-platform web app. And if you want Android and BlackBerry users to be able to have a native app, too, you often have to build each platform from scratch.
Types of Apps
Let’s make an important distinction here. Apps can be divided into:
Those that are meant to directly generate income, and
Those that are built for purposes of marketing, branding, or customer service.
The first type is the topic of all those heartwarming stories about some enterprising developer creating an iPhone app in his spare time, from which he is making more than enough to quit his job coding TPS report generators at BoringBigCo. There are also real companies that do create and sell apps, quite successfully. The income comes from charging for the app directly, in-app purchases, and subscriptions, or less directly, through advertising (think Angry Birds on Android).
If you’re charging for your mobile product, a native app is the way to go. A mobile website can’t integrate with iTunes billing, which — in addition to providing a ready market of 125 million mobile users — makes payment a snap. Charging for access to your mobile website will require rolling your own payment solution… a tall order on mobile right now.
While interesting and exciting, this category of mobile app is not really what we’re talking about in this article. What’s relevant is when companies produce apps in the second category, for the purposes of marketing, branding or customer service. Good examples are the Starbucks or Target Stores apps.
These are normally free, since the whole point is to get them distributed as widely as possible. And that changes the discussion completely. If we make an app, how many prospects and customers will it reach? That puts a ceiling on the potential success of the app as a marketing channel.
The Reach Of Different Mobile Channels
From a pure “how many prospects can I reach” perspective, the best mobile marketing tool is text messaging. About 68% percent of American cell phone subscribers sent a text message in late 2010, according to comScore’s mobile market share report.
Of course, you can do things with apps and websites that you can’t do with SMS. So how many people can you reach with an app? And how many with a mobile website?
For mobile websites, it’s easy. The best indicator is how many people actually browse the web on their mobile phones. As of late 2010, it’s currently over 36% of all U.S. mobile phone subscribers. So, about one half as many people as you can reach with a text message.
There is more to the story for apps. I was at the San Francisco de Young museum a couple of weeks ago. They threw a little shindig to celebrate the release of their official mobile app.
The only hitch: You could only install it if you had an iPhone. Those of us with Androids and BlackBerrys couldn’t play. That reflects a current reality with apps. An iPhone app only works on, well, iPhones. Your app has to be made separately for each platform.
In North America, the most important smartphone platforms right now are iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. How many mobile users are on each? Here are the ratios in the U.S., as a percentage of all mobile phone users, for the last quarter of 2010:
iPhone: 6.75%
Android: 7.75%
BlackBerry: 8.53%
TOTAL: 23.0%
In other words, if you decide to only make an iPhone app, fewer than 7% of all mobile phone users will be able to use it. If the app’s primary purpose is marketing, you’ll need to decide whether this reach is big enough to be worth it.
And if you develop three different apps to cover these three most common platforms, you’re going to potentially triple your cost. All so you can reach only a fraction of the number of people you can get with a mobile website.
To make things worse, I’m ignoring Windows Phone 7. A year from now it may have a very significant market share, thanks to Microsoft’s joint venture with Nokia. Most mobile websites will work fine on the new Nokia/WP7 phones the day they are released. But creating and pushing out a Silverlight mobile app is no small task.
Apps Aren’t Free
The costs for this can add up. There’s no such thing as a “typical” app, so it’s hard to give a meaningful average cost. But as a general working figure, we can say it costs at least $30,000 to design, implement and deploy a brand-quality iPhone app. I haven’t found published studies for the equivalent costs for Android and BlackBerry, but since the device fragmentation is greater, it would makes sense that the costs are at least similar.
All the above means that, at the end of the day, creating a set of mobile native apps that reach, say, 80% of smartphone users is going to be far more expensive than creating a mobile web app that reaches 90% of smartphone users. I don’t even mean twice the cost; I mean more like five, maybe even ten times the cost.
In many situations, that’s acceptable. As noted, sometimes you want to do things that just aren’t possible with a mobile website, at least with good quality. Or maybe it is possible, but you know you can create something of better quality with a native app, so that the result is more engaging. For enterprise-scale organizations like consumer banks and nationwide retail stores, they have the capital, and the ROI justifies it. But if your budget for mobile is under $100,000, it may not be a good approach.
How does a mobile website compare in cost? I haven’t found any published study of the typical cost for mobile web design and development. But from my experience running a company that does just that, I can tell you that it’s almost always less than the $30,000 for an “average” iPhone app.
What’s the ROI?
Given all this, how many prospects will a venture reach per dollar? At a conservative estimate of 234 million U.S. adults with mobile phones, here’s the breakdown:
In other words, you can reach nearly five times as many people per dollar invested with a mobile website rather than a native mobile app. And that’s conservative, assuming it costs just the same to create the BlackBerry app as it does to create the iPhone app (it doesn’t), or that a mobile website will cost the same as an equivalent iPhone app (generally, not even close).
Does this mean you shouldn’t do an app? Of course not. There are many other factors involved. If an app user converts 10 times more frequently, for example, the difference is more than justified. But that’s a big hurdle to clear. And if you want to reach users across more than one mobile platform, you have to consider the extra capital investment as well.
Whether you go with a mobile website, a native mobile app, or both, you’ll probably benefit. The continued mobile explosion will make sure of that. Just take care that you get the most bang for your buck by doing what’s best for your business.
The increase in usage of digital cameras combined with social networks becoming a primary method of storing photos has reduced the tangible ownership of our photos.
Since I discovered GRID by the people from VVall, that sense of ownership feels like it may return. It’s not the same as having chronicles of printed photo albums but the way it presents the photos makes it a little more organised. It’s also a great way to get a quick hit and fast overview of your memories.
GRID pulls in all your photos from Facebook, Twitpic, Picplz and Dailybooth. You just give the site access to your accounts and it collates the photos together in a timeline. Photos can also be viewed in the days of the week they were taken. Clicking on the thumbnail of the image takes you to the original file. Fetching images belonging to another persons account is also possible if their photo setting is public.
When I added my Facebook account to GRID it brought together 439 photos from 994 days, dating all the way back to 2008 when I first began using Facebook. I was really hoping it was going to bring together photos that I was tagged in but did not own, just to make the experience more complete, but that was not the case.
Also the site doesn’t merge photos together from different sources, like Facebook and Twitpic which would have been handy. You need to reload each account to view the images.
As we store and share our photos on different websites there is a real need to have a central place to collate and view them.
I have been using Greplin recently and that organises search from all facets of my online life, now there needs to be something that does that for photo viewing and storage and GRID has highlighted this need.Piccsy, HN
Hipmunk is one of those things that sells itself. You look at it side-by-side with the alternative ways to search for airline travel and it’s a joke. And that’s exactly why it’s so awesome that they’ve been able to translate that experience over to the iPhone — and perhaps make it even a little easier.
If you’ve used Hipmunk on the web, you’ll know the drill: You enter a “From”, you enter a “To”, you enter the “Dates”. And then, if applicable, you change the “Fare Type” and “People”, and you’re set. Hipmunk does the rest for you, combing over the listings they have to find you the best flights sorted by “Agony”, “Cost”, “Depart”, or “Length”. It really couldn’t be an easier.
What’s nice is that the flight results pages on the iPhone maintain the grid look of the website. And they even look a little better and are a little easier to navigate thanks to the iOS polish. Clicking on a result gives you mini details about it, and clicking through (with the arrow) gives you all the details.
The one downside is that booking has to be done through the airline and/or aggregator’s website using mobile Safari. So after all the work Hipmunk does tidying things up, it can all go to hell if the airline’s mobile site sucks (and you can be sure it does). Of course, the Hipmunk website itself also makes you go through the airline’ and/or aggregator sites to book — it’s just a little more jarring in the app since it kicks you out to Safari.
But Hipmunk for the iPhone comes with the nice feature of being able to email a booking link or being able to use a code to go directly to a “finish” page on Hipmunk.com if you don’t feel like finalizing booking over the phone.
Developer Danilo Campos details his experience making the app on Hipmunk’s blog here. It’s a nice story as he was simply going to build them an app on his own on the side, when they contacted him to do it.
You can find Hipmunk in the App Store here. It’s a free download.
[Peter Yared is the vice president of apps at Webtrends, which acquired Transpond, a social-apps developer he founded. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.]
Ever since Yahoo Connected TV launched at CES in 2009, there has been a steady stream of TV app platform launches, including Google TV, Samsung, Broadcom/Adobe, Boxee, Blu-ray players, MythTV, and even Microsoft Xbox. However, there haven’t been any breakout apps for Internet-connected TVs — so-called “smart TVs.”
And the dirty secret? The TV apps out there are rarely used. I know this first-hand: At Transpond, the social apps-developer I founded and sold to Webtrends last summer, we made a couple of connected-television apps for one of the major broadcast networks, and the apps had almost no traction.
So what happened? It’s pretty simple. TV apps are cumbersome and awkward to use. Using a remote control to navigate across a bunch of app features is slow and confusing. In the process, you annoy everyone else watching the TV. This is the reason that Apple is not supporting apps on the Apple TV, even though it is essentially an iPod Touch with an HDMI port instead of a touchscreen. Games are the only apps that people want to run on a big screen, and they usually want to run highly interactive, multiplayer games that are well beyond the capabilities of connected televisions. In addition, delivering TV apps required implementing a ragtag assortment of quirky APIs from players ranging from Yahoo Widgets to proprietary offerings from Blu-ray manufacturers.
Instead, people are using their smartphones, tablets, and notebook computers for all of the much-ballyhooed interactive TV scenarios. Who’s that actress on Entourage? Let’s look it up on IMDB. What’s that song at the beginning of Gossip Girl? Let’s Shazam it. What are people saying about this episode of Glee? Let’s search Twitter for #Glee. Even the onscreen guide, the one staple interactive unit that you’d expect to run on the TV screen, is moving to your palm, with apps such as the Comcast’s Xfinity Remote iPad app (show above) that lets viewers browse TV listings and even program their DVR.
The only popular connected-TV apps are the ones that let you select video and audio content on demand, such as Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand, and Pandora. Even these apps are now being replaced with a new generation of mobile devices that can transmit what they are playing onto television screens. Much like using the iOS Remote app to play iTunes music on a stereo with an AirPort Express, Apple’s AirPlay will stream video from any iOS device to a TV with an Apple TV set-top installed.
With flat panels relatively commoditized, TV manufacturers attempted to differentiate with connected-TV features and 3D. However, the market has moved and the real differentiation is offering interactive features in the remote control. When the core differentiator for TVs becomes the controller you hold in your hand, Apple becomes a very scary competitor — and Google looks more like a friend. TV manufacturers should seriously consider bundling Android-based controllers that can run engagement apps and transfer streams to their large screens. It’s either that, or watch their customers change the channel once and for all.
iPad apps like Sketchbook Pro and Brushes, have both helped artists produce amazing works of art on Apple’s tablet.
Hipmunk
[Peter Yared is the vice president of apps at Webtrends, which acquired Transpond, a social-apps developer he founded. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.]