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I spent the weekend just mobile web apps for my online activities. My goal was to see the current state of these apps and determine what might need improvement. My phone is an LG Optimus V (Android 2.2) on Virgin Mobile. Here’s what I found out:
Using mobile web apps with current mobile browsers can result in serious performance problems on the phone. If I had three or more ‘windows’ open in the browser, I found the phone to be sluggish and unresponsive. This is a major issue in that it prevented me from picking up a phone call as phone froze during screen unlock. I found the only way to manage this was to make sure only one or two windows were open at all times.
Notifications are important. Even though I was using mobile web equivalents, I was still getting notifications of new email, messages, etc.. from the installed native app processes. Frankly, this is the big value of a phone - alerting you to new information in addition to texts and phone calls. Providing developers a way to send notifications is going to be key to long term success. I haven’t seen much discussion on how this will be done, but it’s somethings customers will be expecting
Some web apps are great! Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter do a good job of making their web apps easy to use. While I had to go one or two more finger clicks to get what I wanted, I didn’t feel that they were much different from what I’m used to using.
Some apps not so much. Foursquare’s mobile web app is horrible, maybe because the first message you see on the site is “download the app for your phone”
Some apps not there at all. Neither Google Voice nor Skype have a mobile web app. I needed to see some voicemails I received via Google Voice and had to use my native app.
