Blog post written by Coert van den Thillaart. Richard is a former blogger on Blogpodium and is since 2004 active in the middleware area (EAI, SOA, EDA etc.) at Accenture Netherlands.

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For my first blog I would like to write about the mobile internet. To make things clear, with mobile internet I mean accessing the internet on mobile devices like phones and PDA’s. I don’t mean getting access to the internet on your net- or notebook on the move.

Mobile internet is finally breaking through and is currently seen as an important market. But how come this hasn’t happened sooner? After all, the mobile internet is almost as old as the normal internet. We have been able to access the internet through our phones since around 1998 with WAP. However it hasn’t really been a great success. So what has changed making it so popular at the moment.

For me the answer is simple: apps. And this has always been the case. Before apps became more diverse the use of the mobile internet was almost exclusively limited to a single killer-app: e-mail. Being able to read your mail on the go is one of the main (if not the main) uses of the mobile internet. It’s the feature that made the blackberry so popular.

Then what makes these apps so special? Again the answer here is simple: convenience. Accessing internet on the go is different from doing so behind a desk- or laptop. On the go you want to access specific data very quickly. And in most cases a browser isn’t good enough. That’s what was the issue in the very beginning, finding a WAP site that worked, contained the information you wanted and displayed it useful enough on your particular phone. Granted, nowadays the current smartphones can access the ‘normal’ internet’s HTML pages and don’t need special WAP pages, but displaying these normal pages require rendering tricks to attempt to make it work. Furthermore I feel that current browsers, regardless of how good they are, still cannot deliver enough in the convenience department compared to apps . Let me illustrate this through some examples of my favorite apps (these are all iPhone apps).

Wikipanion, IMDb and “Zoek & Vind” (a phonebook app) are great apps for finding information. All three access a particular datasource (Wikipedia, IMDb and the phonebook respectively) and provide a simple frontend to search for what you need and display the results without having to zoom into a particular part to make it readable and (in most cases) without inline ads. Other apps provide direct access to specific data like traffic information, stock information, your bank account or how many minutes are left in your phone contract this month. All just a single ‘click’ away. Then there are convenience apps like Shazam and its many clones. Shazam allows you to sample a piece of music playing through the phones microphone and send it to an online system that find out what song it is you sampled. This mechanic is also available for products through pictures (a la Google Goggles) and barcodes.

One of my personal favorites is “Appie” an app from the largest supermarket in the Netherlands. In essence this is a grocery list app. Nothing special there but what makes it work is that it connects to your personal ‘account’ through your customer card. It then shows you what you bought last and you buy the most. It can even sort your grocery list into an order that is most convenient for the store you are going to buy your groceries at.

Accenture itself also provides an app for its employees for training. Allowing them to do computer based training on the move while waiting in airports, travelling by public transport etc. Apps provide the convenience of providing you with the specific data you are looking for in a format that is tailor made for the device you are using. Opening the app immediately gives you what you are looking for. But the apps alone isn’t enough for their success. What is needed as well is an easy way to get to these apps. And if getting apps is easy enough people actually don’t mind paying for it, even if the data the apps retrieve is free. This simple fact is the other reason why apps are so successful. There is a business model here that works. The model is so successful that all major platform providers have their own stores in place.

The only real problem I see with apps is that they are tightly linked to a platform. Unless a developer builds something for your platform you are out of luck if you don’t have the skills or time to build it yourself. How this will turn out is hard to predict but potentially this could be the downfall of the apps as we know them now. I think that eventually web -apps that are mobile platform independent will have the future. But for now there is no real competition for the platform dependant apps.