These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2010 Fall edition. This post is from the Serendipio team, formed by Luis Muñoz.
You are a mobile Internet startup, and you’re planning your first product. You target smarpthones, and realize that there are so many platforms to build a version of your software for: iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm, Windows mobile… And even more! This is a real challenge, because at least you should develop for the most widely used platforms, i.e. iPhone and Android, and ideally more. But as a startup, do you really have the resources to do this?
In fact, this is a problem not just startups face, but any Internet company regardless of its size. Even powerful Facebook’s Zuckerberg ranted about this recently. The only viable alternative so far was to use plain web standards (HTML + HTTP), but then again that wasn’t good enough, especially if like us, you need to access some of the built-in capabilities in the handset such as geo-location, not to talk about the fact that the HTTP protocol is just flawed when you want to implement a RIA (stateless, no asynchronicity… Enough to write another blog post just for this).
Adobe’s Flash is a partial response to this, but for many reasons its future is unclear (will they ever be able to launch an iPhone version?), especially because of the raise of HTML5, which in our humble opinion is the best solution to this problem. With HTML5 you have all you need to create a powerful mobile application delivered over the web (featuring key capabilities such as geo-location, which of course is paramount to us). HTML5 has a number of advantages that are just too good to miss:
- You target all smartphone platforms (virtually all the important ones support a browser which is HTML5 compliant)
- It’s easier to find developers
- You escape app store dictatorships, and cumbersome procedures to get your product to the store
- Deployment and version control is simple: in fact you control when you deliver new version to your users, not them (actually we think just this reason alone is enough to prefer web apps).
- You have the big industry players backing the technology (Google, Apple, … even Microsoft).
HTML5 is so powerful you add an extra finger when you use it! Picture courtesy of Flickr / justinsomnia
There are things HTML5 can’t do for now, like accessing the user’s contact list (correct me if I’m wrong). But for most situations, web technologies don’t constraint what you can do on the mobile anymore. As a result, we will see a fight between the native apps model, and the web apps model. We think for economic reasons the web model is superior, but so far an important question is missing: what do users prefer? Is their mobile web experience good enough?
This week we have learned about two separate surveys by Orange and Adobe that seem to answer this question. According to these surveys, smartphone users prefer browsers and web apps over native apps. In case of Adobe’s survey, the findings are that users prefer the mobile web channel over apps in the products & shopping and media & entertainment categories. They found that in this case 66% prefer mobile apps. In case of Orange’s survey, users’ preference for mobile web apps in different countries was superior in any case, scoring 70% in the UK. One may argue about a presumed bias in Adobe’s research, given their interests. But Orange findings seem to tell the same story.
So for all the aforementioned reasons, the bet we do in Serendipio is to create a pure mobile web application based on HTML5 technologies. It is a decision partly driven for a need (we don’t have enough resources to target multiple platforms) but mainly rooted in our belief that HTML5 is a technology that will succeed thanks to the industry support, and users’ preference for a web interface. All in all, a perfect fit for a lean startup, to cut development costs dramatically.
