Mobile Momentum – What’s the Hold-up?
Every retailer in the eCommerce world is excited about the prospect of interacting with their customers via mobile devices like iPhones. They dream of the day when a customer places an order using an iPhone app, then drives by the store to pick it up. They envision their customer creating a shopping list, pushing a button, and getting an ordered pick list mapped to the layout of their local store. They also want to create an item-Finder where the customer walks into the store, enters an item description on their phone and gets an aisle and shelf location for that item returned to them on their screen. They would love for their customers to be able to access product reviews, video demonstrations and detailed specifications from their mobile device so that the purchasing decision could be made on the spot, even for expensive items like cameras and TV sets.
There are many rational reasons for this exuberance. There are twice as many mobile phones in the world as computers. The price of cell phone service is expected to continue its downward trend until it is affordable by all but the poorest people on the planet. In the USA, it is hard to find any teen or young adult without a mobile device of some sort, regardless of income. In the US and Europe, the mobile computing device is seen as complimenting the use of the home or office computer. In many parts of Asia, however, the phone is affordable and the computer is not. In these regions, the phone is the only computer available.
However, this beautiful picture is easy to describe, but harder to paint. There are several reasons for this:
· Network Slowness - Network speeds are annoying. Even if you are in range of your carrier’s network, the response times are not up to modern customer expectations, making them reluctant to even try and use their phone as an app platform.
· Model Proliferation - Mobile Phone device models number in the hundreds, and if you count out-dated phones still in use, into the thousands. New models are introduced on a weekly basis, complicating this further.
· Lack of Standards - Very few phones are created to a programming standard. Most phones have a custom interface that is programmed as part of the product development process. This lack of standards makes third-party creation an application that will run on all makes and models literally impossible. In fact, programming to even the five or ten most popular phone platforms is unaffordable by all but the best funded companies. (This is the cause of app-envy, a phenomenon that occurs when your friend can use a great application on her device that doesn’t exist on yours.)
· Phone Browsers - Phone browsers are mostly terrible. Many of us tried using a browser when we got our first smart-phone. We had to scroll up, down, left and right so often that we gave up. It felt like reading a magazine through a keyhole. Most people use their phone-based browsers for flight status, sports scores, headlines and not much else.
All is not lost however, as everyone in the mobile phone industry understands these problems and is motivated to solve them, or at least lessen the pain that they inflict on the customer. I will list a few of these positive trends.
· Network Slowness – The great race of this decade is to improve mobile data transmission speeds. If you remember back 5 or 6 years, you could grow a beard waiting on a page to load on your phone. Now, things are faster, but not nearly like Wi-Fi. However, with each passing year, speeds will improve because this is a “do-it or die” issue for carriers. If fact, there may come a day when Wi-Fi speeds are surpassed by 4G, 5G, or nG.
· Model Proliferation -The number of phone models will continue to increase until this class of devices reaches a certain level of maturity. Eventually, all of the logical improvements will be made, and future improvements will provide diminishing usefulness.
· Lack of Standards – There are two major standards that are here or emerging: iPhone and Android,( along with many ideas for future ones). The iPhone is a pseudo-standard based on the popularity of Apple product. Creating and selling apps on this platform is already a billion dollar business. The tight distribution model via a single carrier, AT&T, is holding this platform back from being even bigger. This could change, however. In the future, other carriers may be selling the iPhone. If this happens soon enough, the iPhone could become the dominant platform for the foreseeable future, resulting in a huge market share. In that case, the developer will be primarily able to program to one device: ----- If that happens too slowly, however, the Google Android OS is positioned to fill the vacuum. Android is an open-source smart-phone operating system that provides many of the features of the iPhone. Its primary advantage is that every phone manufacturer can create products for this platform without paying anyone a fee, and every carrier can sell one that works on its network. Android also provides a Java-based programming target for third-party developers that could grow to rival the iPhone in size, (but spread over dozens of phone models offered by many carriers).
· Phone Browsers - There is one safe course of action that developers can take while waiting for the shakeout to occur: program to the browser. To me, the best part of both the iPhone and the Android phones (like the HTC Hero) is the browser. Both phones display in wide-screen mode when turned sideways. Both have the two-fingered zoom that make browsing on the small screen better than tolerable. This feature makes real non-mobile Web pages easy to view and interact with. Perhaps the wise course for developers would be to program your new apps to the browsers, making sure that the display looks good on the best smart phones. You could then write a native app for each important phone platform that redirects the user to the Web page in one touch.
The mobile niche is interesting, but very fluid. There is gold at the end of this rainbow for those who figure it out, however.
