Eric Meyer on the Potential of Mobile Web Apps

Eric Meyer:

But let’s assume that you’re personally invested in the iPhone/iPad ecosystem and can’t for some reason avoid or leave it. In that case, you’re stuck with that one single store, the App Store.

Except that’s only true because until now, nobody has launched an alternate store that offers web stack applications (WSAs). Maybe that’s because nobody is really building WSAs yet, at least not in numbers large enough to justify building a store to sell them. But then, maybe developers aren’t building WSAs because there’s no central place to sell them.

One thing to keep in mind: the iPhone has better support for mobile web apps than any other system, Android included. This was true when the iPhone debuted — and mobile web apps were the one and only way for third-party developers to write apps for it — and remains true today.

★ Thursday, 3 June 2010