September 25th, 2009

Web development is changing to meet mobile needs

Since the I-Phone’s release, the “general public” has been switched on to mobile computing in a new way. Previously expensive, high end, “smart phones”/mobile-devices were marketed to business users and geeks. Now the landscape has changed: devices are springing up from many manufacturers and Apple’s App Store model is popular across the board.

It seems logical that, as these devices become more widely used, the way users interact with web services will incorporate the mobile platform as a core method of interaction.

Next time I’m building a new service that needs to be accessible on multiple platforms I think it would make sense to build an API before a website. Until recently I’ve planned projects around browser based distribution, now the browser may become less dominant.

Having useful services open to many developers over an API will aid proliferation of the tool. Developers would be free to provide the applications for the various platforms (as Twitter have done, I suppose that’s why the next step on from “hello world” is becoming the Twitter client on many SDK tutorials). I know this is nothing new, but as mobile becomes more embedded into daily life: the way developers build services on the web will need to shift to accommodate it.

This isn’t really a “proper post” more of a stream of consciousness; I’m about to make the shift from Web Developer to Mobile Developer and am very excited about the new possibilities.

  • i disagree. the html 5 etc. will be the future of apps... they will truely be cross platform, where the actual apps for particular sdks require much more effort to get them on most phones....

    bad logic on your part.
  • antics
    No I believe Joel has a point actually. As far as I understand what he's talking about is not about cross platform but more about how we will be using web services from different parties to create products and services.

    For instance, if we were talking about a blog then our blog teaser would be no more than 160 chars long and would be saved to our twitter account. The text would be saved on some other service and images on another.

    Summary/teaser -> Twitter
    Text body -> blogspot maybe
    Images in body -> Flickr

    Then what our product will do is save the URL's to all the various API's and mash it all up.

    What I believe HTML5 will become is a nice user cross platform interface to the services we create. Actually it's up to the user to choose how he want's to interface and preent the actual data.
  • I take your point Travis, but still think mine is valid. I'll expand further on this in a future post: mobile use, so far, focusses on apps that can run in the background on user's mobiles and are easily accessible as native applications.

    Technologies like Nokia-WRT/Ovi-SDK and Opera Web Widgets will leverage the best of both worlds.

    I think a key difference between mobile and desktop is the lack of screen space preventing you from keeping multiple browser tabs/windows open continuously.

    And, I-phone/Android apps wont disappear when HTML5 becomes standard; creating APIs that allow others to customise the service to any platform seems like sound logic (it allows you to adapt to what ever takes off).
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