The iPhone question – and why Arrington is wrong

(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.