My voice

Well, you must be wondering how did I come up with “round 4.0”. To the best of my knowledge, this discussion started with the advent of iPhone, and Apple recently announced the OS version 4.0 which will be released this summer, hence the name.

This browser vs app battle has become an arcane topic of discussion in the blogosphere, conferences, special interests groups and other off-shoot discussion forums and tech/geeky water cooler conversations. But, what do everyday, non-techcrunch following, non-geeky consumer think about this dilemma, who are they siding with and how has this impacted their day to day lifestyle?

To answer this question, let’s look at what technologies and/or services that spearheaded the internet to its current prominence.

Technology trends that helped online (computers) content consumption:

In layman’s terms, we can segment this discussion into three key technology verticals

Hardware 

Software and services

Networks

Hardware: The physical hardware was very expensive. Only government and universities could afford them. But with breakthrough in silicon technologies, the proliferation of computers happened and we, common consumer, could afford  laptops and PCs with good processing power.

Software and Services: Software on the other hand had some interesting twist to its development. In the initial stages of evolution, Software technologies was treading the same course of development as hardware technologies (dependency on hardware capabilities). Today anyone can put up content on the internet, thanks to cloud computing and open source software. But, according to me, it was “Search” that revolutionized the way consumers viewed internet. Or in other words, “search technologies” made the vast internet content accessible for consumers in a format that is easy to consume.

Networks: I don’t think I will have to elaborate here. Dial up modems —>high-speed cable/DSL modems —> Fiber.

Now, back to the topic at hand. Be it app (client app) or browser, the question here is the accessibility to online content.

Current mobile technology trends that is helping mobile content consumption:

I personally feel that mobile content adoption will also follow the same route as it’s older sibling (online). We are seeing some of the early trends in the above three technologies:

Mobile Hardware: It is needless to say that more and more mobile phones are coming out with faster processors and more memory .The fact that “Smartphones” have become the largest growing mobile phone category further substantiates the earlier (online) paradigm.

Mobile Networks: In fact all of the service providers in USA have rolled out 3G services and are now talking about 4G, the next generation of faster mobile networks.

Mobile Software and Services: WAP, WML —> XHTML (MP) —> HTML —> Web2.0. We see a similar trend in the mobile software technology adoption as in Online. But, according to me, what is missing here and could be the next BIG thing is the integrated mobile “search” - search that will make discovering content from the vast internet easy and simple. Until this integrated search becomes a reality, we will continue to see discussions like mobile browser delivered or mobile apps delivered polarize the tech/geeky consumer base.

Here is my two cents as a consumer (layman): Be it app or browser, the idea is to get to the content. Apps may solve the discover-ability problem for short-tail content today, but as we all know, the power of the internet lies in the long-tail content. One way to bridge these two worlds (apps & browser) is to make apps and the associated contents search-able. I want to see apps show up in my mobile search results.

Here is an use case:

Consumer searches for “Pollen count” on his/her mobile phone. The search result shows both apps that displays content around pollen count for the “current location”, as well as links to the websites that specializes with content related to pollen. ( I am not going to talk about ranking and SEO here ). The consumer is given an option to view the content in an app (that he will have to download) or view the contents in a mobile browser.

Even better, if I already have an App that displays pollen count downloaded on my mobile phone, my search result should automatically open the downloaded app and show me the relevant content inside the app. This behavior/user experience will definitely enhance my (terrible spring allergies)  lifestyle.

If you found this perspective interesting, you can follow me on twitter @araman1. Please feel free to share this if you found it useful.