iOS, Android, and the mobile web

As Keep­skor approaches its first release, I’ve spend a con­sid­er­able amount of time think­ing about the mobile mar­ket and mobile devel­op­ment. Last week, I looked at the size of the mar­ket oppor­tu­nity; This week, let’s cover more tech­ni­cal issues.

Many Ques­tions

The mobile mar­ket is basi­cally bro­ken out in a 2 + 2 con­fig­u­ra­tion: Android and iOS are the two con­tenders you can’t do with­out, while RIM and Microsoft are the two you might want to keep an eye on. Look­ing at this through the lens of lim­ited resources, it makes for tough choices. If you only have resources for one plat­form, which should it be? If you have resources for more than 2, should you also try to reach a third plat­form (and if yes, which one) or should you pour more invest­ments in the first two?

In order to bet­ter make those calls, one must assess the mar­ket posi­tion of each of the play­ers and place some bets as to where those play­ers will be in 12 months. While inter­est­ing from an intel­lec­tual chal­lenge, it can be emo­tion­ally wrench­ing from a com­pany stand­point as some of the bets you make today could help turn your com­pany into a win­ner or loser.

App or web?

Mobile apps seem to be the largest trend here. While many new apps have come up over the last few years, there doesn’t seem to be much dis­cus­sion of mobile web offer­ings. Curi­ously, the inter­net seems to be splin­ter­ing into javascript-heavy apps run­ning on users’ com­put­ers and mobile appli­ca­tions of the same apps run­ning natively on mobile devices.

With HTML5, a lot of the ben­e­fits that mobile apps could offer seem to dis­ap­pear: whether it is access to geo-location capa­bil­i­ties, local caching so the app can run when there is no sig­nal, or even access to hard­ware capa­bil­i­ties like a cam­era (some­thing Google is try­ing to bake into future ver­sions of HTML), there appears to be an increas­ing array of pos­si­bil­i­ties that would ensure some par­ity between web-based offer­ings and apps-based ones.

How­ever, the web has a few chal­lenges to over­come. For starters, local noti­fi­ca­tion, or the abil­ity to throw some type of alert flag when the appli­ca­tion is not run­ning, is not avail­able in web apps. One-click billing is not built-in by default. Access to local hard­ware devices is also lim­ited. But ulti­mately, the prob­lem web apps are going to encounter when com­pare to local apps have noth­ing to do with technology.

The main value of an iOS or Android app over a web app is largely a mar­ket­ing issue. To a lot of thought lead­ers, the web is seen as yesterday’s inven­tion and apps are seen as the cur­rent hot trend. To launch a web app in 2011 is seen as sim­i­lar to try­ing to launch a CD-based offer­ing in 1995: maybe inter­est­ing but prob­a­bly not, and more likely out­dated than up to the lat­est trend (or to put it in more bru­tal terms, it would be seen as “dead,” as per the cri­te­ria high­lighted in Om Malik’s excel­lent post on the sub­ject.)

Fur­ther­more, the pres­ence of an app in the respec­tive app stores by Apple, Google (and now Ama­zon) rep­re­sents mar­ket­ing chan­nels which can­not be matched in the open web. As restric­tive as they are, those chan­nels can rep­re­sent a sub­stan­tial advan­tage for new prod­uct offer­ings. The pres­ence of your apps’ icon on a user’s phone is also another mar­ket­ing marker that is hard to be matched by web appli­ca­tion: yes, it true that book­marks can be pre­sented along­side appli­ca­tions but few users know how to do that and even fewer actu­ally do make those links.

If an app is launched on a plat­form like iOS and Android, it gets more pub­lic­ity than if it launches as a mobile web-based offer­ing. This, by the way, is some­thing I see as a rea­son for con­cerns in the long terms as it means that most of the debate is now cen­ter­ing not on a more open world but on one as to which walled gar­den is bet­ter: Apple’s or Google’s?

As a strong sup­porter for a more open web, I find myself con­flicted: on the one hand, I see that get­ting into those walled gar­dens is bad for the web as a whole; on the other hand, in order to run a suc­cess­ful busi­ness, I have to be in those walled gar­dens. Almost a year ago, I cov­ered this as Apple is the new China and things have got­ten worse since, as Google is fol­low­ing a path sim­i­lar to Apple. But in the end, one has to be real­is­tic: the only way to influ­ence this debate is to become suc­cess­ful enough that your voice gets ampli­fied: so play­ing in the walled gar­dens is imper­a­tive for any new mobile com­pany that wants to succeed.

iOS or Android first?

With apps as an obvi­ous first step towards devel­op­ment, the next ques­tion in the deci­sion tree is Android vs. iOS. Here, there are con­fus­ing sig­nals in the mar­ket­place: on the one hand, one can talk about mar­ket size and see that Android is becom­ing the most used oper­at­ing sys­tem in the mobile world. On the other hand, one can see the frag­men­ta­tion of the Android mar­ket as a developer’s night­mare.

Assum­ing the fact that most star­tups have lim­ited resources, one could safely make the bet that a less frag­mented mar­ket is eas­ier to launch a suc­cess­ful prod­uct on and thus devel­op­ing for iOS first would make the most sense. That is gen­er­ally the rule that most devel­op­ers fol­low and I want to chal­lenge that rule.

Accord­ing to Apple, there are over 350,000 apps in the app store. By com­par­i­son, the Android mar­ket has over 100,000 apps. So one can safely say that there are roughly 3 to 4 apps on iOS devices for every app on Android devices. Today, the path of most appli­ca­tions is to estab­lish them­selves on the iPhone, get the adu­la­tion of the Apple crowd and then move to migrate to Android devices.

This gen­er­ally means that apps which were suc­cess­ful on the iPhone ben­e­fit from a lift when they finally make it to the Android mar­ket­place as Android users are curi­ous to see what all the hub­bub was about. This sit­u­a­tion has led to a sit­u­a­tion whereas both top 10 lists are dom­i­nated by apps that first saw the light of day as iOS ones.

But what if one were to apply the amount of effort that goes into craft­ing a well-received app for iOS into devel­op­ing a sim­i­lar app for Android first? What if a com­pany were to decide to pri­or­i­tize its efforts on devel­op­ing the best app for Android devices? All things being equal, a great app devel­oped for iOS would have to be bet­ter than over 350,000 apps while a sim­i­lar app being devel­oped for Android would have to be bet­ter than 100,000 apps.

When look­ing at those num­bers, com­bined with the fact that the Android mar­ket­place is explod­ing, it seems that Android devel­op­ment makes more sense when first get­ting out the door but there is yet another catch.

Free or Paid?

Paid apps seem to fair bet­ter in the Apple world than in the Android world. I don’t know if it is due to the demo­graphic pro­file of Apple users vs Android users (remem­ber that Apple tends to mar­ket itself as a pre­mium brand, prob­a­bly cre­at­ing a user com­mu­nity that is more afflu­ent and more free-wheeling with its spend­ing) but the fact of the mat­ter is that if you are mar­ket­ing a paid app, this is some­thing you have to consider.

So if your mon­e­ti­za­tion model is purely cen­tered o sell­ing apps, you may be bet­ter off using Apple’s offer­ing (as long as you can fig­ure out how to build a suc­cess­ful busi­ness 99 cents a time.)

On the other hand, few apps with hybrid strate­gies (social, web, mobile) are offered as paid ones. A few exam­ples like Face­book, Twit­ter or LinkedIn all seem to show that app that also work as web-based plat­forms are gen­er­ally free (as plat­forms though, they have cre­ated oppor­tu­ni­ties for oth­ers to mar­ket paid apps on top of their ser­vices). If your app is a social web app, the Android mar­ket seems to be a bet­ter place in the short run.

The key to this posi­tion­ing will have to be around your company’s abil­ity to present itself as break­ing the mold. By going against the grain, you are likely to suf­fer the ire of Apple fan-boys but the ensu­ing con­tro­versy may get you mar­ket­ing views you would not have got­ten otherwise.

Dan­ger to Android

Today, Android is indeed a frag­mented mar­ket. So devel­op­ment for that plat­form is more com­pli­cated than devel­op­ment for iOS, where one only has to worry about 2 phones (iPhone 3GS and 4).

The chal­lenge Google now has is bal­anc­ing its open­ness while mak­ing it eas­ier for devel­op­ers to deal with the mul­ti­tude of changes. Its recent efforts in try­ing to tighten up reg­u­la­tion of the plat­form can cut both ways. Devel­op­ers on the Android plat­form should keep an eye on the impact of those efforts on car­ri­ers and device man­u­fac­tur­ers sup­port. If Google tight­ens the screws too much, it could lose some of the momen­tum it has built and give com­pa­nies like Apple and Microsoft a chance to estab­lish lead­er­ship in the space.

The sec­ond tier

Today, devel­op­ers have to develop an offer­ing for both the Android and iOS mar­ket­place. Once they’ve done so, the next strate­gic ques­tion is whether to put any effort into RIM, HP (aka. Palm) or Microsoft’s offering.

If I were to fol­low the points above, logic might dic­tate that the smaller the plat­form, the bet­ter the way to shine out. How­ever, at the cur­rent time, those plat­form look too small to cater to today. The recent announce­ment from Nokia may point to Microsoft becom­ing an emerg­ing plat­form again but  the actual switch is not due for another cou­ple of years. At that point, the mar­ket­place may look rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent again.

So at the end of day, my rec­om­men­da­tion (and what we’re bet­ting on at Keep­skor) is Android first, mobile web sec­ond, iOS third, and then fig­ure out the next step.