1. Content Driven Mobile Apps

    March 5, 2010

    Content driven mobile apps are the future of content on the web and an offering that digital agencies need to be selling to clients.

    Basically, instead of using a browser on your phone to access a mobile website, you keep a little app on your phone’s desktop that pulls down content from the web. The app also has access to the features of the phone – geolocation, contacts, accelerometer etc.

    I’m not talking about iPhone apps that are expensive, difficult to develop and have limited coverage. Compared to more heavy duty mobile apps, mobile web apps (often called “widgets”) are:

    • easy to develop using traditional web technologies (HTML, javascript and CSS)
    • quick to roll out (increasingly they don’t need app store approval)
    • cross platform – ie: one app can run on the iPhone, Nokia, Android, Blackberry etc. (well, they’re heading that way)
    • content driven – ie: they are about information, entertainment etc

    For all those reasons, they’re a good offering for digital agencies. There’s no reason why an agency couldn’t sell in a mobile app for clients like Melbourne Central in the same way as a blog (not online yet), a FaceBook profile and a Twitter account . It would make sense to use exactly the same content to power a mobile web app.

    Examples

    There aren’t many. There are plenty of mobile apps, but apps that are driven primarily by content are pretty thin on the ground. Lookng around for examples, I find myself largely settling for links that point to the general feasibility of content driven apps.

    However, some people are making money out of them. A Sydney company called Tigerspike presented an mobile app version of this site that’s still in development. It’s driven by live feeds – from drivers, pit crews, news etc. If the content is compelling, it will be a success.

    http://www.v8supercars.com.au/

    Speaking of compelling content, remember how the web got popular in the first place? there would be plenty of ‘adult content’ apps if they were allowed. Virtual girlfriends seem popular:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M40CWyXzmrI

    News and updates via RSS work on the mobile:

    http://www.macworld.com/appguide/article.html?article=140310

    This is an interesting one – you plug in an RSS feed (like the one automatically generated by a blog) and the app is created for you:

    http://oviappwizard.com/web_nokia/signIn.jsp

    Still more links

    http://phonegap.com/ – There are many different flavours of phone out there, but web apps run on all of them and cross platform development is a reality

    http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/05/the-future-of-web-content-html5-flash-mobile-apps/ – informed opinion from a successful man

    http://www.tigerspike.com/ – a local (to me) Sydney company who presented at the Nokia Development Conference earlier this week

    https://store.ovi.com/ – the Nokia app store

    PS:

    Another interesting announcement is that Nokia intends to continue to support Flash. In fact they are aiming for full Flash 10 support (as opposed to Flash Lite) in the reasonably near future.