The Web is The Future of Mobile Development?
In an article posted on MacRumors.com, Google Engineering VP, Vic Gundotra, states during the MobileBeat 2009 Conference held in San Francisco that he believes the Web would prevail as the dominant mobile development application platform despite the huge success of Apple's App Store.
He is quoted saying:
"We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly thatÂ’s where Google is investing."
While I do believe the Web plays a huge role in mobile development along with the future of our advancing modern world, I believe he overlooks a very important aspect that is overlooked in the "modern" world. The writer notes that Web technologies such as HTML5 and CSS animations, which Vic Gundotra uses to support his claim, due not address the needs of more complex games that require 3D services such as OpenGL. At one point I do believe this issue will be addressed since technology is (almost) always advancing. The important aspect that is overlooked though, is the aspect of connectivity.
According to Internet World Stats, the number of US subscribers to broadband internet as of April 2006 is 42.9 million. Using Google to find the total population of the US in 2006, which was roughly 298.3 million, we can see that only 14.5% of the US subscribes to broadband internet. It is unclear whether these are personal or business subscribers, but we can still see that the number of people using broadband internet is drastically low. Also, USAToday posted an article showing how slow broadband internet is in the US when compared to the rest of the world (coming in at a mere world ranking of 17th).
President Obama realizes the issues we face due to this problem. It is great to see a President who seems to understand the significant role technology plays in the world today, and how it contributes to the success of our future world. With most of our country without access to broadband internet for one reason or another, the majority of people face difficulty in obtaining information quickly, which in turn prevents them from being able to advance their own learning. Take YouTube for example. There are a plethora of videos on there that can help advance your own learning (e.g. how-to videos), but without broadband internet your ability to watch those videos is hindered. iTunes U is another example. It is a recent discovery for me and I have to say it is an amazing resource, but again, without broadband internet it is extremely difficult to download the videos that are available. The broadband internet package (~$7.2 billion) is intended to address that issue, but I wonder if people like Vic really understand this problem? Google is an amazing company (as is Microsoft and Apple in their own respect) that has revolutionized our access to information. I truly believe that due to Google, the rate of learning will increase because we can find the information we want or need easier and quicker than before, but we still need to remember that the majority of our country, along with the great majority of the world, still have limited or no access to broadband internet, or even the Internet itself.
Although mobile phone technology has advanced, we still face issues of connectivity in the mobile world too. Not everyone owns a "smartphone" that has a mobile browser, nor does everyone have 3G access, which is still relatively slow. We even face issues of just getting signal on our phone to make a simple phone call or send a text message. With that said, I do not believe the web has won... yet. Until we are able to be constantly "connected" regardless of location and situation, I still believe standalone applications on mobile devices like Apple's iPhone will be dominant in mobile development because we will still be able to use the application despite not having any connection to the Web. 4G is still under development, but it seems like it will help address the issue of constant connection along with increased speeds. It is still being slowly introduced, and we will probably see it being more widely used sometime next year. Hmm... but then if 4G comes in next year and addresses those issues, then I guess Vic's prediction is correct? Looking forward to see what the future holds.