Mobile Development Still A Mystery to Most

I spent a lot of my time at SXSW this year sitting on panels discussing the mobile space. I did learn quite a bit, but the thing that I found most intriguing was the difficulty people are having distinguishing the various mobile spaces, particularly the difference between mobile applications and the mobile web. These two practices are fundamentally different and must be mentally separated by our community. The mobile web is about re-purposing current sites or creating stand-alone sites that are meant to be experienced through the phone's web browser. Mobile application development deals in applications written to run directly on the phone. These spaces are vastly different and have noticeably divergent challenges to overcome. Obviously, I am doing both of these spaces a slight disservice by only using one sentence to explain them, but hey, this is a blog post.

On Sunday I sat in an excellent session by Brian Fling of Blue Flavor where he opened a fire hose of information into the audience concerning the mobile web, running the gamut from mobile IA to the sweet spot of visual design. The overall message was clear: we already have most of the tools we need, it's getting easier, and mobile users are a space that absolutely cannot be ignored. When he finished and the questions started coming in, they were centered around technologies such as flash lite, brew, and other mobile development platforms. He deflected the questions easily, but the confusion in the audience was quite clear.

Later, I sat in a panel specifically put together to talk about mobile application development. This panel was a bit of a disappointment. One of the panelists was John Poisson from radar.net. He was very well spoken and their crew had done some very intelligent things (like only choosing words in their destination email addresses that didn't have letters on the same key adjacent to one another), but I don't believe that they have actually built a mobile application. Their service depends upon a user taking a picture and sending it to their servers via MMS, and the service then provides them with a site where they can view their friends' pictures in their mobile browser. This is NOT a mobile application, this is a very clever use of the mobile web. Yet there he was on the mobile apps panel. No wonder people are confused.

The only person on the panel that had any experience building a true mobile application was Simon King from Yahoo! who is working on their Zone Tag product (there was a designer/developer from Nokia but he couldn't talk to specifics due to secrecy issues). King spoke with authority and the most interesting thing he said was his definitive statement that Flash Lite is not a production ready technology primarily because of memory leak issues and lack of access to the phone's firmware. He did mention that it is an excellent prototyping tool, but certainly not ready for prime-time. Naturally, once the panelists finished and the questions started coming in, they were along the lines of migrating current web sites to the mobile environment, the state of ajax on the mobile phone, and other mobile-web centric topics. Most of these questions were simply deflected by the panelists and referred to Fling's presentation notes.

There will be enormous growth in both the web and application development for mobile devices in the near future. Yes, it is true that mobile applications use the same data services as the mobile web and there is definitely overlap between the two spaces, but they are different enough that they must be separated in people's minds. One is no better than the other, but developing and designing for them is going to be a challenge and we need to ensure that people understand their medium so that the correct challenges are addressed and questions are answered. I do not believe that there was any clarity delivered at SXSW, and that is mildly disappointing.