Consider the following graphic about consumer services.
You’ll see that shopping, searching and entertaining is mostly done on a phone web browser already. On the opposite, informing, navigating and connecting tends to be centred on native apps.
This makes sense as people like to read news even when offline and GPS requires 3D rendering so those are good cases for a native app. “Connecting” or let’s call it “Facebooking” however is a difficult case: It isn't very data-heavy so it should make a good use case for a web app, however such apps just aren't made available by Facebook; despite developers suggesting it would make Facebook faster. Facebook has even published a public endorsement of HTML5, but it might take some time for us to see the benefits from that.
Another study confirms these findings by saying that from all the time we spent using native apps, 43% is spent playing games (needing 3D rendering and making it a good use case for native) and 26% falls into social networking. Although there is a plethora of news-readers and information delivery apps (“utilities”) out there, they seem to be far less used than the aforementioned categories.
In this study it can be seen that shopping is almost never done on an app users have installed on their smartphone.
While we may see a shift towards dedicated native apps from Amazon and ebay in the future, it is understood that all such developments are preceded by efforts to get the browser experience right first.
The British Government Digital Service (responsible for all e-Government activities) is expressly against any native-app-first approaches:
Standalone mobile apps will only be considered once the core web service works well on mobile devices.
Consider the following graphic about consumer services.
You’ll see that shopping, searching and entertaining is mostly done on a phone web browser already. On the opposite, informing, navigating and connecting tends to be centred on native apps.
This makes sense as people like to read news even when offline and GPS requires 3D rendering so those are good cases for a native app. “Connecting” or let’s call it “Facebooking” however is a difficult case: It isn't very data-heavy so it should make a good use case for a web app, however such apps just aren't made available by Facebook; despite developers suggesting it would make Facebook faster. Facebook has even published a public endorsement of HTML5, but it might take some time for us to see the benefits from that.
Another study confirms these findings by saying that from all the time we spent using native apps, 43% is spent playing games (needing 3D rendering and making it a good use case for native) and 26% falls into social networking. Although there is a plethora of news-readers and information delivery apps (“utilities”) out there, they seem to be far less used than the aforementioned categories.
In this study it can be seen that shopping is almost never done on an app users have installed on their smartphone.
While we may see a shift towards dedicated native apps from Amazon and ebay in the future, it is understood that all such developments are preceded by efforts to get the browser experience right first.
The British Government Digital Service (responsible for all e-Government activities) is expressly against any native-app-first approaches: