My Notes on Josh Clark's presentation - Mobile Apps: Native or Web Based?

It was a very interesting lunch, meeting new people and talking personally with Luke Wroblewski, who I've admired a great deal since I met him last year in Philadelphia. And now it was the turn of Josh Clark.

I gotta say I enjoyed his presentation in quite a special way because of his way of approaching the topic. He captured my attention entirely. I've been following him on Twitter for a while now, it was nice meeting him in person and listening to what he had to say up close.

I enjoyed talking to him personally and I appreciated him for answering my questions.

Here are my notes on his talk:

• One can think about mobile platforms as cultures, and the existence of many of them creates challenges.
  
  
• BlackBerry – 40% of global enterprise
• Higher texting activity than any other device
• Low browsing activity – Browsing on a BlackBerry sucks
  
  
• iPhone – High levels of activities
• Higher activity than other devices even though it has a lesser share of the market.
• It brought technology to the masses.
  
  
• Android – It’s the technology from geeks to geeks
  
  
• Windows Mobile – Classy, urban and modern
  
  
• There is no single culture, each platform user has different needs and goals.
• If you don’t know what it’s like to live with a phone, how can you be an expert designing natively for it?
• You can’t be an expert on all of them.
• It’s a split decision on platform choice – There’s not a definite winner
• But only 30% of phone users have apps on their phones.
• Think small – consider SMS text apps
• Less is often more. Or maybe just enough is more.
  
  
• Everyone loves web
• You’re in complete control in what comes to distribution
• You don’t have to build separate apps for each phone
• There’s more ubiquity in building for mobile web than for normal web.
• On mobile you can actually use HTML5 and CSS3
  
  
• The current culture – You think apps are for doing and web is for reference.
  
  
• Web’s weaknesses
• Can’t match native apps in experience possibilities or speed.
• Not easy matching great expectations
• Heavyweight libraries
• Clunky graphic tools and not enough hardware
• In the end, web bows to apps
  
  
• Then again, web is available for everyone, unlike any native app.
• Your website has got to look great on mobile now.
• Native apps win in payment and findability issues.
• Web makes it easier to share data to other users, though.
• Battle of the back office – it’s easier and inexpensive to start building web apps, and testing comes in easier too.
• Consider your audience – what’s the best choice considering them?
• There’s not really a fight, it’s a business consideration.
• The goal is the same – create a good experience for your users
• You need to have both!
• Still, we should keep a consistency and have the same core content across all apps.
• There’s stuff that shouldn’t be on the desktop version either. There shouldn’t be a normal and a light version; the content should be the same.
• A small screen doesn’t mean the user wants to do less.
  
  
• Mobile mindsets
• Microtasking – Means you should prioritize some content, but not necessarily strip out the rest.
• Local – Not only about GPS, but all the other sorts of inputs you can give through your mobile. The goal is NOT to remove complexity, don’t over-simplify. There’s a different between complexity and complication.
• Bored – Users with a long span of attention.
  
  
• The winning approach is to think about the interfaces as a spectrum of apps that generate a single satisfactory experience.
• There’s no desktop strategy, mobile strategy… there’s just a plain strategy.