Tom Hume’s Mobile Predictions for 2012
Elle Holgate on Newsletter, 20 January 2012
Start-of-year predictions are a cliche of blogging, and the really big stories of the last year came from the left-field: few predicted that HP would drop WebOS and shutter the TouchPad just a year after shelling out $1.2bn for Palm, or the frenzied yet thorough bedding of Nokia by Microsoft. Yet it’s worth looking for a few trends, and considering what might happen if they continue.
“Web versus native” is the “Mac vs PC” debate of the 21st century: a frequently hyperbolic argument based on the false premise that for one to win, the other must lose. The web won’t be going away any time soon, and every aspect of it is being actively developed by smart, well-funded organisations who live and breathe it. At the same time, mobile users are voting with their feet and choosing native apps over web, where both are available – see the investigative work of Ben Evans, who concludes that 70% of Facebook mobile users use apps. This fits in with figures Comscore revealed at Mobile Monday in London this last July: mobile web usage is growing, but app usage grows faster (for Facebook at least).
So here’s a prediction: contrary to what you might read elsewhere, 2012 isn’t the year when native apps are overtaken by the web. For services which are frequently used or have a commercial aspect, apps are justified and so increase their lead; but there’s plenty of room elsewhere to allow for a healthy growth in mobile web use too.
Kindle is looking increasingly interesting, with over a million devices being sold a week in the run-up to Christmas. That’s not bad, but in the same quarter Apple sold just over 28 million iPhones and iPads (2.3 times as many), and Google announced 700,000 Android activations a day (4.9 times as many). Whatever the proportions, that’s three healthy ecosystems: that’s good news for consumers, and good news for providers of content and services who can reach them.
It’s hard to imagine that B2C sales of apps are sustainable. We’ve just seen the mighty (and endearingly frank) UsTwo come clean about sales of their excellent Whale Trail game, which despite being high quality and getting lots of press attention has so far failed to turn a profit, and is unlikely to do so on the back of Android sales alone. A resetting of expectations regarding the riches to be found in indie game publishing is long overdue. We saw this happen with J2ME games in the mid-2000s, and with the web itself at the turn of the millenium: frictionless distribution is not the only ingredient of a successful business.
And finally, a few stories to keep an eye on this year: the various lawsuits in which Android is embroiled (Oracle vs Google, Motorola vs Android, Samsung vs Apple) make for fascinating reading with the aid of the excellent FOSS Patents blog from Florian Mueller. Nokia and Microsoft have executed well so far on their first product, the Lumia; whilst a good product may not itself be enough (as HP/Palm showed with WebOS), it’s a great first step and Microsoft will be spending heavily this year to keep up momentum. And finally, 2012 is set to be a big year for the newspapers: buffeted by scandal and with the honeymoon of their first tablet apps over, now working out how they’ll build sustainable digital businesses.
by Tom Hume
