Orange Group has just released results of a recent study which show that 75% of UK mobile users prefer using their mobile web browser to apps for accessing online content.
I find this interesting as it certainly squares with my own views about the mobile web (i.e. WAP 2.0) being the overall long term focus for business investment rather than apps.
It’s also interesting that Marks & Spencer and John Lewis have both elected to go the ‘WAP not APP’ route with both reporting good initial results.
As I’ve previously stated, I don’t have any problem as such with apps – they have a definite and valid role to play in the overall mix of tools available and have helped to give mobile online access a high profile in the last couple of years- but I do have a problem in the over-hyped notion that they are somehow the ultimate method for mobile content access.
Apps are small embedded software programmes running on a particular handset’s native operating system and which do useful specific functions. Some of these functions can indeed be linked to relevant online content and data in real-time and locally store that data for offline localised manipulation. Developed with the mobile user and one finger in mind, these are great for on-the-go users who wish to achieve a specific goal in the shortest time possible and who tend to be juggling many different things at the same time as walking, talking and not watching the traffic.
On the other hand, the blank canvas that is the web browser allows for across the board access to the vast galaxy that is ‘the web’ and which is the environment in which the vast majority of us spend our online time and which HTML 5.0 is increasingly enhancing.
Mobile apps and browsers are both valid and have distinctly different purposes and functions and both can happily co-exist on the same device – but neither are a substitute for each other.
The other useful fact revealed by Orange is that as mobile plans are increasingly bundled with fixed price 24×7 internet access then cost is becoming far less of a barrier to mobile internet use with only 13% of UK respondents citing that cost is an issue.
Additional interesting facts are that mobile has resulted in 14% of users watching more TV (via their mobile) and 25% use their home PC online more.
This again squares with my own mobile experience as since I signed up for my first ‘all-in’ mobile account at the beginning of this year I now use my mobile as the main means to access BBC news and catch-up TV – in bed (what an exciting life I lead) – on the train whenever I’m commuting, or in fact almost anywhere that I might happen to be with a few minutes to kill. (I’ve found that throughout 2010 I can access mobile internet pretty well from almost anywhere I’ve been in the UK – even relying on my Three mobile modem to do serious work on remote servers from the wilds of North Yorkshire after my dad cancelled his broadband account as he hadn’t a clue what it was for and my mother had stopped using it owing to a period of hospitalisation – thus leaving her online friends unable to contact her and thinking that she must have already shuffled off…..).
*I plan to follow up this post with a review of both M&S and John Lewis mobile sites shortly.