It's easy to think of web applications and mobile applications as two distinct entities (or two distinct collections of entities). Web applications are hosted on web servers in data centers and they "run" in a browser. Mobile apps are installed on smartphones and tablets and run on those devices. Web applications are large, complex things and mobile apps are small and easy to use. Web applications are general, running on all major web browsers, and mobile apps are built for specific platforms (iOS, Android, etc.).
Yet the two are converging. Mobile apps are becoming more like web applications, and web applications are becoming more like mobile apps.
Let's start with mobile apps. The "standard model" for an app is a small, lightweight user interface that talks to services on back-end servers. In that sense, a mobile app is very much like a web application, which is a web page that sends requests to back-end servers.
The "standard model" for mobile apps is also that the app is installed once on your device and there it sits, ready for you to use. That's not really true, at least not with many of the apps I use.
The app does sit on my phone, but apps are upgraded frequently. The "good old days" of PC applications (or mainframe applications) saw upgrades to applications on an annual frequency, sometimes longer. Today's mobile apps are updates monthly, and sometimes more frequently. It seems that Twitter sends updates every week!
The upgrades are usually automatic and silent, requiring no intervention from the operator. One can tell when an app has been upgraded (sometimes), because when they display a small "what's new" dialog. A few apps are upgraded more often than I actually use them. I know this because I always see the "what's new" dialog when I run the app.
With upgrade frequencies weekly and approaching daily, perhaps it doesn't make sense to install the app on the phone. That is, perhaps it makes more sense to always download the app from the server. In this way, a mobile app is becoming more like a web page, which is always downloaded from the server. (I'm ignoring cached copies.)
Looking at web applications, we can see changes that make them more like mobile apps. The "standard model" for a web application is that it lives in the browser and has access to only the back-end servers, with no abilities to manipulate data or devices on the host computer. Yet this is no longer true: web apps can upload files, send e-mail (or tie in to local e-mail clients), and now manipulate the local camera and attached devices.
Web applications are becoming more like mobile apps. Mobile apps are becoming more like web applications. Perhaps we will meet in a convenient, happy middle ground that lets us get the best of both worlds.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment