Web Apps or Browser Apps?

In the "battle" between mobile apps and apps that run from inside browsers, Conduit, has found success with its cross-browser web application platform, and has announced support for Google Chrome.

That means publishers will be able to develop an application once for Conduit’s platform and have it work on Chrome and other major browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.

Conduit has also made thousands of Chrome-compatible apps available at its App Marketplace, making it the largest source outside of Google for Chrome apps.

From May 2008 to March 2010, the company’s active users rose more than 500 percent, from under 20 million to over 100 million, and its revenue grew tenfold. From August 2009 to May this year, the amount of apps with over one million active users rose from single digits to over 40.

A recent Coca Cola Zero app was shown to over a million users within a day, and within ten days it reached more than 80 million people with nearly 1 million minutes of combined viewing time. That last statistic is worth considering. Many apps are ads, or simply links to web pages.

Conduit announces Google Chrome support for its massive web app platform | VentureBeat

Web Apps Will Catch Mobile Apps, Study Suggests

Count Global Intelligence Alliance as among the analysts who believe Web applications will be a viable competitor to app store programs over time, and that content distribution is likely to be a direct beneficiary of the trend towards using Web browsers to serve up mobile apps.

The same might be said for subscription-based mobile services such as news and weather as well.

Despite conventional wisdom, by 2013 HTML5 will enable Web-based apps to provide user experinces that rival that of mobile apps, GIA argues. But there are other reasons to believe Web-based apps will prove attractive. Web apps offer an architectural advantage, namely cross-device launches.  Mobile apps have to be adapted for each operating system, and often for discrete devices as well.

The Web also arguably is a better platform for subscription-basedservices such as communications, news, weather, financial services, retail and shopping, where user analytics are important. But GIA notes that smaller providers and pay-per-download services might well find the mobile apps route profitable, as such an approach can be directly tied to a clear revenue model.

But Web-based mobile apps will take a couple of years to develop. Right now, respondents surveyed by GIA say user adoption is about twice as high when using a mobile app approach. Some 47 percent of respondents reported that user adoption was higher when using a mobile app approach, compared to about 23 percent of respondents who said a Web approach produced higher end user adoption.

Web apps, on the other hand, are a bit more "sticky" than native apps, respondents report. About 27 percent of survey respondents said user activity peaked at initial download and then steadily declined. Only 15 percent of Web app developers said that was the case.

Likewise, about 23 percent of respondents indicated that user activity kept growing after download, compared to about 33 percent of Web apps users. Of course, that might be a statistical artifact produced by the different use cases.

To the extent that a mobile app provides access to "static" content, usage would decline over time, in much the same way that any user's viewing of a new movie will be highest at download and then drop off. Compare that to a cable TV subscription or news feed, that might be used on a continuing basis because the actual content is dynamic, rather than static.

The survey also found that end user session lengths tended to be longer for native apps, compared to Web apps. About half the respondents say native apps produce longer sessions. Only 20 percent of developers say Web apps produce long sessions. Of course, much depends on the type of application.

Many interactive or transactional apps will tend to last longer than many content delivery apps, if only because the transactional app will require time-consuming search and research. A user investigating air travel or lodging in a distant city might need to spend quite a bit of time conducting research, compared to a user playing a game or downloading a specific bit of content.

About 53 percent of native app developers reported that this approach cost more than creating a Web app, compared to 17 percent of respondents who said the Web app cost more than a native app to create.

About 43 percent of developers reported that maintenance and update of native apps cost more than a Web app approach.  About 24 percent of respondents indicated that a Web app approach was more costly to maintain and update.

About 60 percent of developers reported that a Web app approach was faster than a native app development approach.

Web Use Shows Serious Fragmentation of Attention

In March the average American visited 111 domains and 2,500 web pages, according to Nielsen Online.

The average time spent per page is 56 seconds. Portals and search engines dominate, capturing approximately 12 of the 75 hours spent online in March.

That's what you call fragmentation.

Small Business Sees Web Site Investments as "Advertising"

In 2008 small and medium-sized organizations spent $6.7 billion on online advertising and will increase that spending relatively slowly between now and 2013, according to researchers at Borrell Associates.

By 2013, SMEs will be spending about $7.4 billion on online advertising, representing relatively slowish growth of nine percent over a five-year period, an annual growth rate of a bit more than 1.5 percent annually.

That might surprise you, if only because the rate of growth is slow slow it might be considered "flat." But Borrell suggests something else is happening. SME spending on Web sites will grow about eight percent a year.

You might not consider Web site spending as advertising, but Borrell Associates says this is precisely how SMEs think about the matter. It isn't so much a shift of advertising from traditional methods, including telephone directory listings and direct mail, to the Internet. It is that small businesses see their own Web sites as a form of "advertising," perhaps a functional substitute.

Consider this a sort of shift to "earned media" (awareness gained through promotional efforts rather than paid advertising). The other angle is that small businesses rightly see their Web efforts as partly a direct sales channel, partly direct marketing and partly a substitute for other sales activities such as printing and distributing flyers, postcards and other direct marketing messages.

Mobility, SaaS, Laszlo, Google, et al

As work and workers become more mobile, enterprises are starting to use more Web-delivered applications. As that starts to happen, Web-based desktops and productivity suites are going to make more sense. Enter Laszlo and the Laszlo Webtop, referred to as a Web 2.0 Desktop. Laszlo Webtop has developed bundled solutions for three target markets: service providers, enterprises and developers.

Laszlo Webtop for Service Providers comes bundled with Laszlo Mail and Contacts and supports customized Web portals. Laszlo Webtop for Enterprises comes bundled with Contacts and optional Laszlo Mail.

Meanwhile, the Laszlo Webtop SDK for Developers offering is a software development kit allowing developers build their own Webtop solutions compliant with the Webtop.

This just makes sense. If one is going to build a distributed applications architecture assuming broadband access, then assuming a Web-based desktop also makes sense.