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Apr
15
(This post is a follow-up to “Why did Mowser fail?“)
An iPhone in every hand will not ignite a mobile web revolution. That much is certain.
Both Michael Arrington and Russell Beattie make this mistake. Perhaps that comes from living in a echo chamber for too long - both likely have iPhones, are heavy web users on their devices, have friends who have iPhones, and therefore think all would be well if only everyone had one like them. Arrington is shockingly naïve when he says “…it will be much better to push prices down so that today’s iPhone is available for next to nothing in the third world.” Of course, I bet he hasn’t lived for too long in the “third world”.
Blaming puny hardware and tiny screens as the primary causes for poor mobile web adoption is thinking along very narrow lines indeed. As I outlined in the previous post, we could build much better applications today, using hardware and screen sizes available today - we aren’t building software that’s good enough because we haven’t yet understood how people use the web on their phones.
But that’s not all. Russell points out that “…in the US 85% of iPhone owners browsed the web vs. 58% of smartphone users, and only 13% of the overall mobile market” and uses that to conclude that as iPhone reaches more users, all problems will vanish (”better devices and full browsers”, as he says).
That’s not necessarily true and it more likely isn’t. iPhone targets a specific segment of the mobile user market - users who were likely to be heavy users of the Internet on their phones - people who would use their phone to browse the Internet. (Not that these users purchased a phone just for the Internet experience). It will continue to capture that market as it’s introduced in more countries. Therefore it’s unlikely that those numbers Russell quoted would jump up substantially if everyone had an iPhone.
What does iPhone mean for the future of the mobile phone? I predict that while it’ll be a strong influence on broad design principles, it’s unlikely that every phone of the future will be like iPhone. For instance, Apple has shown how to design software that truly takes advantage of a touchscreen. More phones will have touchscreens in the future than they would have if it weren’t for iPhone, but maybe not with pinch-drag features. More phones will have full-screen applications. More phones will have smarter menus and make more data available across applications. And so on.
But the verdict is clear. It is designing better software, not praying for better hardware, that will truly get the mobile web rolling.
[...] The iPhone question - and why Arrington is wrong [...]
In fact, i think that survey is unfair because there is a good chance that a major chunk of iPhone users bought it for their web usage & therefore if 85% used web from iPhone, its astatistic against them!
Secondly, while we argue too much on quality, software & hardware, i think awareness levels & time available are two major issues - in countries like the US & UK where awareness is high, time available to browse the net for services is low. And we in India can find time but awareness, along with services available through internet are poor.
Rahul - nice pickup of the cherry picking argument that iPhone users are the best users, so giving the whole world iPhones immediately doesn’t solve anything. You still need to create an application that gets everyone interested. It’s probably too complicated to get that over in a short post but it’s true that the iPhone is the savior argument just makes people think that you don’t have to think about mobile user behavior anymore.
@Tom - “mobile user behavior” is just the term. We seem to want to replicate state of the art PC applications today (in-browser apps, ad-supported) on the mobile.
But Mobile just isn’t ready for that yet. For several reasons:
* hardware+screen size
* lack of ubiquitous high-speed mobile data connections
* carrier-enforced walled gardens
* primitive software
So it looks like we need to go through one more evolutionary cycle before mobile applications reach parity with their PC counterparts. Hence my argument in my previous post about native/Java apps. The iPhone is a different kettle of fish altogether.
[...] The iPhone question - and why Arrington is wrong [...]
Apart from things pointed out by Rahul here, another aspect of the low usage of internet on the mobile phones is the prohibitively high tariff structures by most of the operators. The base cost of getting hooked is close to 50-75% of the average ARPU generated by the mobile users. Add to that the access charges based on per kB of download and you are in scenario where only a select few would like to use mobile for accessing the net.
[...] of what the future of mobile is, without considering what is happening around the world. I have spoken about this before. Coverage of mass usage of mobile phones, innovation in hardware (not just with top-end phones) [...]