For over 20 years, I’ve led technical strategy and product initiatives for databases, information integration, analytics and big data. Today I work at Apigee, where we help organizations embrace the exploding app economy built on mobile apps, defined by APIs and powered by massive streams of data. I can say that few businesses are prepared to effectively use the new sources of valuable enterprise data that is being generated “outside” the enterprise today in the app economy.

A growing number of businesses are successfully building new channels through APIs and third-party applications that tap their data and Web services. As a result, all kinds of important customer interaction is happening in apps written by other people (partners and developers), far away from the enterprise core. There are three ensuing new sources of data that organizations must be able to capture, measure and analyze to get a complete view of their customers and businesses:

• The first is the data that is generated around the use of the APIs exposed by that enterprise. This data reflects API calls, correlating Web traffic and contextual data that adds color to the API traffic.
• The second is the data that is generated by the applications that make calls to the enterprise APIs. These applications also make calls to various backend-as-a-service APIs, creating performance- and behavior-related data that reflects user and app behavior.
• The third is relevant, contextual data generated by the use of other enterprises’ APIs — such as Github, Twitter, Stackexchange — all of which annotate and add color to the specific interactions with the enterprise in question.

These three new categories of data have important characteristics that make them very different from the traditional enterprise data. For instance, traditional enterprise sources have well-built structures that enable the data sources, and the analytical processes around them, to be well modeled, enabling ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) and warehousing efforts to become mainstream. With the three new types of data, ETL and warehousing is dead on arrival. Since data changes continuously, its shape is evanescent, and the analytical needs change day by day.

This loss of control requires new data marketplaces and data syndication models that few enterprises are currently prepared for, but there are a few important steps organizations can take today to start.

Step one is to have an API so you can exercise control over how your partners and third-party developers access your data. This seems obvious, but you’d be shocked to learn how many companies are getting their websites scraped and have no control over how their data is getting used.

Step two is to surround your APIs with other services (such as user management, state management, event handling, etc.) that either you provide or that you can access through relationships with the providers of those services. This will help ensure the success of the apps built on your APIs — and make it easier for you to directly capture or infer the usage of those apps.

Step three is to determine the value of other people’s APIs and the data that sits behind those APIs. Just like you are exposing your APIs and making your data and services available, other parties in the app economy ecosystem are doing the same. The business strategy around this quid pro quo is something organizations will have to master.

Finally, having access to the data (your APIs, the apps built around your APIs, and other third parties) is still just that — data. You have to stitch all of this data together to create powerful signals. A good thing about this new data is that stitching is actually easier, not tougher, than in core enterprise systems. Data is more verbose, information is meant to be shared and hence better described, and more data creates opportunities for better stitching.

Business leaders should be concerned that they don’t have full visibility into how customers are using their services in the new channels created in the app economy. The truth is, most of the analytics and data and insights you get today are wrong. You simply don’t own all the data anymore. Every enterprise has to rethink their data platform for this new world. Enterprises that can capture and analyze new big data outside of the enterprise will succeed in the app economy, those that do not, will fail.

Dr. Anant Jhingran is vice president of products at Apigee. He joined Apigee from IBM, where he was vice president and CTO of IBM’s Information Management Division and co-chair of the IBM-wide Cloud Computing Architecture Board. At IBM, he was responsible for the technical strategy for databases, information integration, analytics and big data, and he helped deliver IBM’s PaaS capabilities. 

Jhingran will discuss the Cambrian explosion of APIs at GigaOM’s Structure Europe conference next week in Amsterdam.

Image courtesy of Flickr user jeff_golden.

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Although the majority of API attention has centered on consumer Web services, an emerging cadre of startups are focused on infrastructure and business processes. These newcomers are providing a broad range of critical services neatly packaged as frameworks or APIs. Some of these companies, such as Salesforce and Google Maps, are next generation SaaS providers that have built solutions to serve both end users and developers. Others, including Mailchimp and Twilio, are pure play offerings that solely target developers as customers.

Open source helped to reignite the open systems movement in the late 1990s, which popularized the idea of creating public projects and actively soliciting community feedback and involvement. Tens of thousands of open source projects have been created, but only those projects that built sizable communities have thrived. Most of the large infrastructure software categories were eventually filled by strong open source projects and some spawned successful commercial software companies, including RedHat, XenSource, Sourcefire, MySQL, JBoss, Talend and Alfresco. These companies span a broad range — from operating systems/hypervisors to security to middleware and database/content management.

Developers now expect the same instant gratification as end users. Instead of having to download, configure and manage all the associated software components, more and more of these capabilities need to be packaged “as-a-service” — hence, the move to cloud services. It is also important to remember that software development is an art, and programmers want a very simple and elegant programming interface.

These developer-focused startups provide simply packaged programming interfaces for a wide range of cloud-enabled services — from such basic infrastructure capabilities as storing and retrieving files to much more complex business processes, including invoicing, billing and payment processing. In some instances, startups begin by offering a constrained solution around a key feature/function, but then leverage that starting point to broaden the service into a more complete offering. This is the approach that CloudFlare and Urban Airship took, for example.

Targeting developers is not the only thing these startups are doing differently. Leveraging the inherent distribution of the app economy gives these new companies another intriguing opportunity to disrupt the incumbents. The explosive growth in mobile applications and the associated re-platforming means that developers are rebuilding from the ground up and evaluating new technologies at all layers. In addition, the emergence of so many new languages even further complicates the problems for incumbents. Originally written for the C++ and Smalltalk audiences, one of my favorite programming books of all time, “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software,” by the famous Gang of Four, has certainly influenced software architects on clean and reusable design abstractions.

Here is a broad, but by no means exhaustive, list of some of the potential infrastructure categories and disruptive companies. (If you want an exhaustive list of APIs check out ProgrammableWeb.) Some of the categories are unfilled by potential disruptors, and other categories include pure cloud services as well as software products. (In a follow-up post, I will share another list that includes a range of higher level business process type services.)

In some ways, this isn’t an entirely new approach. During the Web and client server technology cycles, some successful software companies used a similar model of providing libraries (and even DLLs). Crystal Reports made it extremely easy for developers to embed reporting within their applications; Hummingbird and Wollongong offered (TCP/IP) networking stacks; Visigenic provided (ODBC) database libraries/drivers; and Neuron Data and PowerBuilder provided platforms for user interfaces. These examples show that it was possible to build successful businesses at all levels of the software stack.

Consequently, APIs are only the latest packaging as developers transition from objects and class libraries to RESTful services. However, it seems that the promise of service oriented architectures is finally being realized, and it is creating a strong opportunity for innovative business models.

So what does all this mean? Client-server software was replaced by on-premise Web-based apps, which are in turn being replaced by cloud/SaaS solutions. Perhaps the next generation of software will be solutions composed from these APIs/services. All of these exciting startups are proving that developers need — and want — these services. But ultimately, building complete solutions might require a LEGO-like construction kit. Is the future of software about Lightweight Enterprise Gadget Orchestration? Perhaps, there is even an opportunity for someone to provide an Interface Builder (remember NextStep?) that can natively access the myriad of emerging SaaS/APIs.

Robin Vasan, managing director at Mayfield, invests in the cloud, SaaS and mobile themes. Some of his current investments include Alfresco, Couchbase, Marketo, Centrify and Webroot. Past successes include Akimbi, Trigo and webMethods. Mayfield has also been involved in such other leading companies as 3Com, 3PAR, Citrix, Concur, Legato, Nuance, Tibco and Vantive.

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According to a study last year from the University of Maryland, the Facebook app economy, which includes more than 8,000 companies in the U.S. alone, created 182,000 jobs in 2011. The total value of Facebook’s app economy, the study said, is more than $12 billion. And that figure doesn’t even include non-app companies in the Facebook ecosystem. In the run-up to Friday’s big IPO, startups that owe (at least part of) their success Facebook are likely giving an extra bit of thanks. Here are ten.

Adaptly
The New York-based startup, which gives brands a consolidated platform for buying ads across social media networks, announced earlier this month that it raised $10 million in funding, bring its total to $13.2. The company operates across multiple social networks but at this point is most closely connected with Facebook.

Branch Out
Riding Facebook’s momentum, this San Francisco-based startup is angling to take on LinkedIn. Since releasing its Facebook-integrated mobile Web app, the social professional network, founded in 2010, has grown from one million monthly active users to about 13.5 monthly active users. In April, it raised $25 million, bringing its total investment to $49 million.

Fab
Design and commerce are at the heart of Fab but social sharing – and Facebook, in particular – have helped it grow to 4 million members in less than a year. Since integrating with Facebook, Fab says referral traffic from Facebook has increased from 15-20 percent to 30 percent. This week, it announced a collection of new social features make its Facebook relationship even deeper.

Gogobot
Aiming to dominate the social travel market, Gogobot says it’s drawing much of its growth from Facebook, where 92 percent of its users connect to the service. This week, it crossed the 1 million mark for registered users and says it signs up a new member every 15 seconds.

Payvment
Earlier this year the social commerce platform exclusively on Facebook announced that it had reached its one millionth monthly active shopper. In December, Payvment, which has raised about $7.75 million, said the annual transaction volume of merchants in its network tripled during 2011.

RootMusic
MySpace may still mean something to musicians, but RootMusic is helping to migrate more artists to Facebook with its BandPages app. It’s raised $18 million in the past couple of years and counts about half a million artists among its users.

Spotify
Spotify was already an international hit before it moved stateside. But, as my colleague Janko points out, its Facebook integration has certainly helped its adoption. Music industry blogger and former Jupiter Research analyst Mark Mulligan estimates that the company has hit 20 million users, “turbo charged” by Facebook and its U.S. launch.

Viddy
One of the much-hyped “Instagrams for video,” Viddy is currently in fourth place on AppData’s leaderboard for Facebook Apps. Boosted by its Facebook-powered growth, it raised $30 million at a valuation upwards of $300 million.

Wildfire Interactive
One of several social media companies capitalizing on the need of brands to manage their presence on Facebook (including top rivals Buddy Media and Hearsay Social), San Francisco-based Wildfire was one of the first winners of Facebook’s fbFund program and has been taking off ever since. In the past year, its customer base doubled to more than 15,000 over the past year, while its workforce tripled to more than 330 people. They’ve raised $14.1 million to date.

Wooga
Launched in 2009, the Berlin-based company is the third-ranked game developer on Facebook, in terms of monthly active users, according to Facebook.  Its games, including Diamond Dash and Bubble Island, draw more than 40 million active players every month. It’s raised more than $30 million in venture funding.

Update: A previous version of this story mentioned King.com. While it has seen impressive growth since launching on Facebook, we realized it was likely too mature a company to include on a list of startups.

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Facebook, lately has been trying hard to make the world aware of its role in the fast growing app economy.

For instance, it has been talking up the success of video apps such as Socialcam  and Viddy, and points to how it has turbocharged the downloads on Apple’s iOS platform. Of course the success of those apps and their post-download usage is debatable, for many view them as spam. In addition, there was been some talk of social news readers losing some traction after a fast start, that has made some question Facebook’s role in the app-economy.

In a blog post on their developer blog,  Facebook’s Aaron Brady notes:

In the coming weeks, people will be able to access the App Center on the web and in the iOS and Android Facebook apps. All canvas, mobile and web apps that follow the guidelines can be listed. All developers should start preparing today to make sure their app is included for the launch.

For the over 900 million people that use Facebook, the App Center will become the new, central place to find great apps like Draw Something, Pinterest, Spotify, Battle Pirates, Viddy, and Bubble Witch Saga. Everything has an app detail page, which helps people see what makes an app unique and lets them install it before going to an app.

The App Center is designed to grow mobile apps that use Facebook – whether they’re on iOS, Android or the mobile web. From the mobile App Center, users can browse apps that are compatible with their device, and if a mobile app requires installation, they will be sent to download the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Facebook is also betting on creation of paid apps and building an ecosystem around those apps.

Many developers have been successful with in-app purchases, but to support more types of apps on Facebook.com, we will give developers the option to offer paid apps. This is a simple-to-implement payment feature that lets people pay a flat fee to use an app on Facebook.com. If you are interested in the beta program, please sign up to receive more information.

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That’s good news for developers and handset makers alike. Hardware makers of smartphones — not that they likely doubted this — know that consumers will keep looking t0 improved devices with more features and performance; especially as they cycle through cellular service contracts and replace old handsets. For programmers, it validates the mobile app economy, even as the industry debates the value of platform-specific software as compared to increasing functionality through HTML 5 and the mobile browser.

Two key aspects in the app-versus-web debate are simplicity and a broad range of functionality; both of which make total sense to me. When I need a specific piece of functionality, I’d rather tap on a dedicated app instead of spending time browsing the web to meet my needs. Respondents to the PwC survey agree:

“There are more and more apps. There’s an app for everything that you do … It makes everything easier.”—Respondent, aged 30–45

“They are quicker and easier. The only reason I ever use a browser is to Google stuff.”—Respondent, aged 21–29

One key area that PwC expects to see growth is in mobile storefront apps due to an increase in consumer comfort with online purchases from a smartphone and poor web-based purchase experiences today. While most survey respondents participate in online commerce — 86 percent in the past year, with 42 percent buying weekly — only a subset of those do so from a smartphone: 52 percent in the past year, but only 12 percent weekly. The main reasons they skew toward buying on a device that’s not a smartphone? Screen size is a hassle for entering payment data, and there are security concerns too.

I expect the security issue to disappear over time as the younger generation, already more comfortable with sharing information and making mobile purchases, grows up. And applications will help too: One survey participant made specific note of how easy it is to use the Starbucks Mobile app to buy goods in the store. As an avid user of the same app, I concur. If I had a greater number of similar apps in addition to a digital wallet of sorts for my credit cards, I’d be apt to leave my physical wallet behind.

Given consumer preferences for single-purpose, focused apps, there’s no reason to think that earlier predictions of 44 billion mobile apps downloaded by 2016 won’t hit the mark. In fact, given the uptake of smartphones from current feature phone owners, combined with reliance upon the handheld devices and improving mobile broadband networks, 44 billion downloads is starting to look conservative from where I stand.

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Berg Insight’s expectations are more than double a prediction from earlier this year. In April, ABI Research estimated 44 billion mobile app downloads by 2016. The pace of smartphone adoption is on the rise — 75 percent of the phones T-Mobile will sell this year will be smartphones, for example — and with phone sales come application downloads. As a result, I’m more inclined to buy into Berg’s higher estimates.

While both estimates look at the overall mobile application market, this dramatic growth is particularly evident in Apple’s business: App downloads from iTunes are growing far faster than sales of digital music. Horace Dediu’s Asymco blog examined the historical sales and revenue from both earlier this week, and the charts show a staggering difference in the growth rates:

Based on this data, it took less than two years from the introduction of the App Store for mobile apps to outsell digital music on iTunes on a daily basis. And since then, mobile application downloads have skyrocketed as Apple has continued to grow iPhone sales, which now account for five percent of all phone sales worldwide, according to the company. Sales of Apple’s iPad and iPod touch will also increase mobile app sales in iTunes and will also help this trend continue.

While it’s clear that mobile apps have dethroned digital music downloads because people want a wide range of functionality on their smartphones, there may be another reason for the slow rate of music downloads: subscription services. There’s a wider range of music services available now than there was a few years ago; think Spotify, MOG, Pandora, Rdio and others. Instead of purchasing an album for $10, smartphone owners can rent a month of music for the same price, giving them access to millions of songs.

This change in digital music distribution could eventually affect mobile apps. Earlier this week, references to application rentals were found in the code for the latest iTunes beta, for example. And we’ve seen plans for mobile game rentals on Google Android devices as well. If rentals and subscriptions begin to permeate the mobile app market like they have for digital music, developers will need to consider the effects and figure out how to best make money from new models.

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Has the “app economy” sparked by the Facebook platform led to the creation of almost a quarter of a million new jobs and over $15 billion in spinoff benefits for the real U.S. economy? That’s the claim made by a study released Monday by researchers at the University of Maryland: news that will no doubt make Facebook feel loved as it prepares for the f8 developer conference. But do those estimates stand up to scrutiny? The Facebook app report seems to do what many similar studies of economic stimulus attempts (such as the Olympics) routinely do: overstate the benefits and understate the factors that might make the numbers look smaller.

The study, which comes from researchers at the University of Maryland’s business school (a PDF version of the full report is here), uses a number of formulas to come up with the impact that Facebook apps have allegedly had on the economy. One takes the number of companies developing apps — of which there are 148, according to the report, including Zynga and Playfish (which was bought by Electronic Arts in 2009 for $300 million) — and the average number of daily users for each Facebook app, and then uses those to estimate the total number of employees who work for third-party app developers.

Using those calculations, the report’s authors came up with a figure of 53,434 for the number of people directly employed by firms that develop Facebook apps. Then they used another formula to calculate the “multiplier effect” of those jobs: in other words, how many other jobs might have been created in related industries because of those jobs. Then they estimate the average compensation for all of those jobs in order to come up with the total economic impact of Facebook apps.

Billions of dollars in spinoff economic impact

After all these calculations, the authors say Facebook has created between 182,000 and 235,000 jobs with a total economic value of between $12 billion and $16 billion:

As a result of analyzing the aforementioned factors and data, a conservative estimate of the employment impact of developers building apps on the Facebook Platform in the United States in 2011 is 182,744 full time jobs [and] a conservative estimate of the total employment value of Facebook’s app economy is $12.19 billion. Using more aggressive estimates, the Facebook App Economy created 235,644 jobs, adding a value of $15.71 billion dollars to the U.S. economy.

There has been a lot of coverage of the report’s conclusions, since it appears to show that Facebook is a massive contributor to the U.S. economy and apparently a better creator of jobs than the entire Obama administration. Google came out with a similar kind of report last year that estimated its economic impact at $54 billion — a result of adding up all the payments the web giant makes for AdWords and AdSense, as well as an estimate of how much value businesses get when someone clicks on their name in a search result.

Critics of Google’s report said that the numbers were pure spin from the web company, which was (and is) trying to defend itself against allegations of antitrust behavior. And there’s a very spin-like feel to the University of Maryland report as well, which used data supplied by Facebook. What better way to make the case that the social-networking giant is a positive force in the U.S. economy, and also to promote the company’s f8 developer conference, where it will try to win new converts to its platform?

The problem with such reports is that they pile so many estimates on top of other estimates that it’s difficult to determine when they have lost touch with reality — just as every economic-impact report concludes that winning the Olympics or some other sporting event will be a windfall for a country’s economy, and almost inevitably it turns out to be just the opposite, due to factors that weren’t considered originally.

Problems caused by overestimating the “multiplier effect”

One of the problems is the multiplier effect, which the report’s authors use to conclude that close to 250,000 total jobs have been created as a result of the Facebook app economy. There are a number of problems with assuming multiplier effects when it comes to fiscal policy, including the fact that investments often “crowd out” other investments, and these would apply to Facebook’s case as well. For example, it could easily be that all (or at least some of) the development effort expended on apps has simply transferred money and jobs from one area of the economy to another.

As experts in calculating multiplier effects have also pointed out, in some cases these effects can be very transitory and their impact on the economy can be short-lived (PDF link). According to one description of the process, “projects that add relatively little value to a raw product will have smaller multiplier effects.” That kind of criticism could also easily apply to something like a Facebook app, which in some cases individual developers have created in a matter of hours. How much value could such an app possibly create?

Is the 10th copycat version of FarmVille worth as much in jobs and value as the first? Unlikely. And Facebook has also been accused of being a drain on the actual U.S. economy, because of all the time that workers at non-Facebook related jobs spend updating their status or playing FarmVille; a British firm estimated the lost economic value at more than $73 billion a year. Surely some of those billions in theoretical value should at least balance out the aggressive estimates in this latest study.

That’s not to say Facebook hasn’t created value for the U.S. economy, because clearly it has: It’s generating billions of dollars in advertising revenue, and that has obvious benefits, and even if you focus just on the “app economy,” the rise of companies such as Zynga — which has a market value estimated at $20 billion — has obviously created some value. But theoretical stock-market valuations are different from “real” economic value, and so are the estimates of the theoretical jobs created as a result of people clicking a FarmVille link.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users tarikgore1 and Tracy O

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The similarity ends there, however: All three of the winning apps couldn’t possibly be more different, highlighting the wide spectrum of functionality across today’s smartphone application economy. Here’s a quick summary of the top software picks from Vodafone’s Mobile Clicks competition that brought in more than 200 entries:

• Winner of €150,000: FrogTek. This point-of-sale inventory app leverages the camera of an Android smartphone to read product barcodes and help small shopkeepers in developing nations to manage product stock.
• Runner up for €50,000: ParcelGenie. Instant gifting is the premise behind this mobile software. Users select a gift from a catalog of 300 different options — such as chocolates or wine, for example — and the recipient receives an SMS alert to expect delivery by the next day.
• Runner up for €25,000: Wunderlist. This cross-platform task management system doesn’t surprise me as a winner. Earlier this month, I highlighted Wunderlist as my to-do app of choice due to support for multiple mobile platforms, effective task entry and advanced sharing features.

As much opportunity and reward as there is in the growing app economy, there’s also risk involved; you can’t simply create an app and hope to retire on the profits within in a year. Application discovery is a challenge when a single software title is competing with literally hundreds of thousands other apps. Funding is needed to stay in business to pay resources and help get the word out. And of course, developers need to supplement their solid business plan with an application idea that people are going to want on their handset.

I’m likely understating the challenge that most mobile app developers face, so maybe a better idea is to share this Mobile Clicks video from Vodafone. In it, you’ll see the tough questions posed by the mobile app jury causing developers to think on their feet during an app presentation. Our own mobile app competition, known as Launchpad, takes place later this month at Mobilize and our judges will be surely be posing some similar questions to our 10 chosen finalists.

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Although Windows Phone 7 devices aren’t yet selling well (an estimated 2.5 million units in Q1 of this year) compared to handsets running iOS, Android, or even Samsung’s Bada phones, it’s clear that Microsoft understands a strong ecosystem can help drive sales forward. Unlike first-generation handset launches such as the Palm Pre and the initial Android handset, the G1, Windows Phone 7 smartphones have had a reasonable number of third-party titles available. And supplementing them with Xbox Live games and integration points adds to the attraction. But Microsoft has to keep evolving the Windows Marketplace to steal focus from other app stores such as Apple’s, with its 425,000 titles and 15 billion downloads.

Developers and consumers then, should be happy to hear today’s news from Microsoft. Instead of paid apps available in just 16 countries, a total of 35 are now supported. Developers in these seven new markets can now submit apps: Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Israel, South Africa and South Korea. Microsoft is adding more app price options below $5 and is now adjusting price tiers on a country-by-country basis to better account for fluctuating currencies. And developers can offer beta versions of their apps to 100 testers for up to 90 days, which could improve overall software quality.

From a consumer standpoint, it could get a little easier to find apps; a common problem among all of the app stores. Microsoft is adding three new top-level app categories — education, kids & family and government & politics — as well as several new sub categories. Special app offers could increase also thanks to hidden app support tool developers can use. By providing a direct, deep link to a hidden app in the Windows Marketplace, for example, programmers may invent clever contests or app giveaways. All of these strategies are likely discussion candidates at our Mobilize event in September, with one panel specifically focused on building a developer community.

Note that all of these changes to the Windows Phone 7 App Hub and Marketplace are in preparation for Mango, the next major software update for Microsoft-powered smartphones. The company will begin accepting application submissions for Mango next month. Microsoft hasn’t yet announced an official launch date for Mango, but today’s news in combination with Mango app submissions starting in August give credence to rumors and leaks of a Mango launch within the next month or two. Once that happens, and new Mango phones arrive from Nokia and others, we’ll then begin to get a real feel for the future of Microsoft’s mobile play.

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What are our mobile app minutes spent doing? Flurry, which monitors software on  iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and J2ME platforms, says we’re a growing community of gamers, with 47 percent of our app time spent playing. Social networking followed up with 32 percent, while news, entertainment and other activities each accounted for single digits.

The entertainment figure of only 7 percent seems low to me given that mobile video, a time-intensive activity, is popular: Some data suggests that iPad users watch 2.5 times more video than traditional web users, for example. While YouTube has a solid mobile web interface, many platforms kick users into a native YouTube application. Last July, YouTube said it was serving 100 million videos per day through both its mobile software and website.

Regardless of that potential anomaly, the data underscores a few points I’ve made about mobile app ecosystems: If a platform doesn’t have a strong set of third-party apps available, consumer adoption of the platform becomes a greater challenge. To some degree, we’re now seeing that with Google Android Honeycomb tablets as well as RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook. There are other issues facing each of these, but a lack of optimized apps isn’t helping any, especially with the move from web to apps on mobiles.

Flurry’s data also has me pondering the future of web apps; namely, will HTML5 become as strong of an “app” platform as some would hope? As Chetan Sharma noted last year, the beauty of the web as an application distribution point is the reduced fragmentation it brings:

[T]he fragmentation issue in mobile only gets worse with each year with new devices, different implementations and operating systems, the cost of rolling out an app across multiple devices around the world can increase exponentially. As such, the browser provides the prospect of being the great unifier so you can truly design once and run everywhere (where the browser is available). For the simple apps that are less interactive and require less multimedia capability, like the popular social networking and news/weather apps, browser provides the perfect avenue to maximize impact with least amount of development.

Sharma’s thought made perfect sense to me back then, and while I’m still in general agreement with him, I’m beginning to wonder if the situation has changed. Instead of a mobile market with a number of platforms, we’re now witnessing the space become dominated by just two in Android and iOS. The third spot is up for grabs, although Windows Phone 7 has recently gained perceived momentum. BlackBerry / QNX and webOS are in transition, while Symbian is on the way out.

All the smartphone platforms are using WebKit browsers, so there’s still opportunity for web apps to unified across a large number of devices, but with such dominant operating systems in play, there may be less need for the web browser as a “great unifier” in mobile than there was just a year or two ago. And as long as apps keep appearing, the trend indicates consumers will keep buying.

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