Mobile apps are all the rage, but it’s a complex environment for companies making an investment in the mobile internet. Boris Kraft, CTO of Magnolia, looks at how standards such as HTML5 may bring down the barriers
The native landscape
Currently, the majority of mobile apps are developed to run natively on individual platforms, using the software development kits (SDKs) provided by the mobile operating system vendors. In comparison to basic browser-based applications, this gives the advantage of better, device-specific access to the underlying hardware functionality and features such as touch-screens, motion sensors, cameras and GPS. However, this also means that companies have to develop individual apps for each mobile platform they wish to cover.
Looking towards its next phase, the mobile internet is increasingly about more than just smartphones and tablets. Apple iOS and Google Android look set to become a central part of their next generation web TV platforms, HP's WebOS is being pushed onto its entire range of peripherals and even as a second OS on its notebooks, and MeeGo, the collaborative Linux-based mobile OS driven by the Linux Foundation, is being used as the base platform for significant projects in in-car entertainment, web TV platforms and media phones. And in the latest development, even Mozilla, makers of the FireFox browser are looking at creating their own operating system.
In short, vendors are involved in a scramble to ensure their platforms become a central part of the 'web of things'. Embedded Linux looks set to be upgraded with more feature-rich operating systems and user interfaces and far more devices look set to gain an IP address.
The native cost
As if the need to develop native apps for different platforms were not enough, now it would appear that these apps may need to be further customised to the functionality of a multitude of different devices running on each platform. The mobile internet would seem to be a boon for developers, but a fragmented and highly costly affair for companies looking to take part.
There is no doubt that investment in developing successful apps for individual platforms can deliver significant returns. If users of a certain device represent a key target demographic for an individual company, custom app development can be a lucrative pursuit. This is especially true where the company can deliver content and services that are especially relevant to users of that device, where they are using it.
But as the mobile internet reaches out into new areas and more and more disparate devices come online, covering them all with this 'native app' approach would risk turning any company into a predominantly IT-focused organisation. At present, most organisations will develop apps for one or two key platforms or devices and use more generic technologies for the all other devices.
The alternatives: more than presentation - let’s talk about innovation
Browser-based mobile websites and applications – the mobile web – still deliver the best generic alternative. Most content management systems work by separating content from its presentation. Therefore CSS templating can be used to present content in a form-factor-friendly way for smaller screens. More advanced content management systems can even deliver the templating and functionality to optimise the user experience for touchscreen, whilst not destroying the experience for other devices.
However, the mobile web is about more than optimising presentation to smaller form factors, it is about delivering relevant content to people on the move. As Sir Tim Berners-Lee put it in an early W3C talk on the mobile web:
“It isn’t just about making the web you know today work on mobile phones. We are talking about Innovation.”
The mobile internet is becoming less about carrying the web around in a bag or pocket, and more the web following you around through a range of pervasive internet devices. Companies will need to deliver personalised content, in a format that is optimised to the function and features of any one of tens of thousands of devices.
The content end-users want, even from the same organisation, will vary immensely according to whether they are sat on their sofa, walking down the high street, skiing down the piste, or traversing the country at high-speed on the motorway.
Through technologies such as HTML5 and the W3C Device Description Repository (DDR) this vision of an intelligent mobile web is rapidly becoming a reality. HTML5 answers many of the significant failings of earlier mobile web apps, with improved security and the ability to develop applications that continue working off-line when Internet connections are lost or unavailable (these browser-based applications can then re-sync when a new connection becomes available).
But the real vision is for HTML5 applications to offer a constant user experience across multiple devices. Users will be able to access a common profile in the same familiar applications through any device with an HTML5 compatible browser. At the same time, technologies such as DDR will allow these applications to recognise and adapt to the features of the device being used to access them, providing native app levels of device specific functionality.
With the more convenient and consistent user experience offered by the ‘web-centricity’ of HTML5 applications, the global consulting group McKinsey recently estimated that:
‘…more than 50 per cent of all mobile applications will switch to HTML5 within three to five years - and the rate of transition could be considerably higher and faster’.
The speed of uptake for HTML5 is also likely to be driven by the cost advantages for companies looking to deliver content. By providing one common format for apps and the broader mobile web, HTML 5 and its surrounding technologies are likely to dramatically reduce the cost of developing the technology to present mobile content to a wide array of fixed and mobile devices.
App development gets easier - content management gets a lot harder
But whilst HTML5 seems likely to reduce the cost of developing the apps themselves, it looks set to dramatically complicate the underlying task of delivering the right content to an app. The custom integration and functionality currently needed to serve content to a handful of native mobile apps seems relatively simple in comparison to the demands of a personalised and adaptive mobile web.
Serving relevant content, tailored to all the possible permutations and combinations of features in tens, if not hundreds of thousands of increasingly intricate and innovative devices may sound like the realms of science fiction, but it is, in fact, a reality companies have to grasp in order to compete on the mobile web.
The personalised mobile web will require content management systems to be integrated with complex analytics tools in order to become precision, custom content delivery mechanisms. Content will not only need to be selected and tailored to the individual, but also according to their location, their inferred circumstance and to the device they are using.
In this increasingly present vision of the mobile web, ease of integration and customisation combined with new levels of sheer processing power and scalability, will become the key to enterprise content management.
Boris Kraft is Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Magnolia CMS
www.magnolia-cms.com