WAP that APP!
To App or not to App, that is the question. 
A recent survey by Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that more than half of the mobile Internet users access the Internet daily from their mobile devices — over 35 million a day. Another article by eMarketer about the recent Keynote Systems poll for Adobe shows that for certain categories like product reviews, blogs, and news, users overwhelmingly like to use the mobile browser on their phone rather than a native mobile application.
These and other stats from comScore keep reinforcing the strong emergence, adoption, and growth of the mobile web, but an important question remains relevant in today’s digital marketing world.. do you need a smart phone native app to reach and engage your audience?
The answer will depend on the overall mobile marketing strategy and the feature set required for the product. Multiple factors come into play including the audience reach, and the type of devices used among the target demographics.
Let’s take a look at some of these factors:
- Overall mobile reach. There are 280M mobile subscribersin the U.S. with 168M using SMS daily, and over 75M have a data plan. But, only around 30%of the mobile U.S. subscribers have smart phone, the remaining 70% are still on feature phones with regular WAP browsers. Those users can be reached by SMS, WAP-optimized mobile pages, and mobile WAP paid search, but not through native apps. This will change as smart phones overtake feature phones by the end of 2011 according to Neilsen.
- iPhone reach. The iPhone constitutes only about 8% of the U.S. population today. This will also change and increase this year thanks to Verizon’s new iPhone deal.
- Updating and customization. Any app in the iTunes store is under the mercy of Apple. It takes longer to launch and update iOS apps because of the review and approval process by Apple.
- Ubiquity.. the mobile Internet provides universal access to reach all mobile devices regardless of their manufacturer.
- Discoverability. There are now over 250,000 mobile apps on the iTunes app store. To make an app noticeable and discoverable, it requires a real marketing effort backed by strong advertising spend. This can be true for a mobile website as well.
- Performance. Mobile apps in general do provide better performance as they have direct access to the device resources and processor.
- Features. XHTML and front-end scripting is limiting on many WAP browsers but many tasks can be accomplished by server-side scripting which can enhance the WAP browser experience.
- Platform. If you are going the native app route, which platform / OS are you going to build for? An app needs to be at least on 2 or 3 platforms to make it relevant in terms of reach.
So.. with the expansion of the mobile web, and the advancements in HTML5, the future will consist of smart phones with powerful full HTML browsers providing a richer media experience for mobile users, but with the limitations remaining in screen size, the challenge will be how to provide a full website experience resized into a mobile screen, something that should give birth to a new breed of mobile web applications and developers.
