This is no piece of news to our ears, indeed Naviblog has been touting itself as one of the leaders on pushing the boundaries of the mobile services and applications since the start, in the same way as others think of twitter, yahoo mail and google calendar for the PC. But the fact is that many bloggers, and increasingly web service platform developers including latest wake-up call from Google's Android, are realising that the introduction of cheap and ubiquitous internet mobile phones is driving the economic case for mobile services.
The bottom line is: it is cheaper to build mobile services based on common web standards that will work on many mobile phones with the same user experience, than developing a number of optimized native applications that you have to download, install and double-click on your phone before using.
But it seems the industry I work in, the mobile app developer industry, is still wedded to the idea. Granted, you can't throw away a body of knowledge of more than a decade of mobile app development overnight, but this shortsightedness is now costing our users and our industry in dollar/yen/euro terms and in terms of growth for content and commerce on the mobile.
A nice piece I found recently from insightful trendwatcher and industry buff Michael Mace, where he states:
"...If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm talking about the Web. I think Web applications are going to destroy most native app development for mobiles. Not because the Web is a better technology for mobile, but because it has a better business model."
The date says Feb 24, 2008, and the title of the piece is "Mobile [native] applications, RIP"... more here.
