The future of mobile apps - and webapps

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Map of iPhone 3G availability worldwideImage via Wikipedia showing the availability of iPhone
The #iPhone app will peak, and then become irrelevant. On the other side will webapps using HTML5 and CSS take over the 4.5 Billion handset market.This is what my crystal ball tells me after one week of vacation.

And how do I dear say that? Now that all in this market is about apps, apps and apps. Study shows that the app market will be more than $30 billion in 2015. Apple just informed they had a $1.5 billion app revenue. Still, Apple holds only a 1% of the handset market. Follow me on this little travel through the three articles I read today. And, ironically, read in my RSSMobile app on my iPhone, and sent to my Instapaper for further processing, which I'm doing just now...


In the article An ISP Offers A Cloud for India - More Like AOL, Less Like the Open Web, Alex Williams from ReadWriteCloud tells how the Cloud is being implemented in India:
Sify Technologies is a a large Indian Internet service provider. It's so large that it is planning to lay undersea cable between Delhi and Singapore for better connected networks between India and the economically powerful city state.
The company is a powerhouse on par with our very largest telecommunications companis in the United States. But its customers do not live in suburban tract houses with desktops and laptops for Mom, stepdad and the kids. The Sifi customer has a mobile phone.They go to cyber cafes to connect to the Internet. They live in rural communities.
And so that is why Sifi is launching "Sify mylife," a suite of cloud-based applications for the millions of people in India who do not own computers nor have Internet access.
It's an interesting play as the service leverages the cloud but in many ways is more akin to the American Online we knew in the mid-1990s. It seems fitting that millions of people would be drawn to a service that give them access to the Internet. Just like AOL did, millions of people can get access to the Sify service. But now the availability is of a different flavor with SaaS type services such as spreadsheet applications and word processing. 
Sify will offer the service through its network of 1,200 cyber cafes. The cafes are operated as a franchise. They use the company's broadband connections for Internet access.
The story remains me on Yunus work in Bangladesh to enable mobile phone access, which won him a Nobel Peace Prize. Since then I've done a lot of imaging how ERP could be done on cheap mobiles.

Will Mobile Web Apps Eventually Replace Native Apps? asks Chris Cameron on ReadWriteWeb. After a discussion of the benefits and hurdles he concludes with:  
"Once we reach a point where mobile devices have the computing power of our desktop machines, mobile Web apps could make a run on native apps, but that is still likely a few years out."
The last article is a forgotten post from Google, long back in May called Google APIs + HTML5 = A New Era of Mobile Apps, Adrian Graham tells:
If you can't already tell, we're pretty excited about the future mobile apps running inside a browser. As mobile web browsers and web APIs continue to evolve, we expect more and more people to hop on the HTML5 bandwagon as a cross-platform way to build powerful mobile apps.
The following two article points to a solution in the next two years. Thats consistent with the remark from an MS WP7 evangelist I spoke with in Oslo, who stated that in two years HTML5 will make the Silverlight framework obsolete as well as mobile apps as we know today.

So thats my sunny tuesday message. How do you see the future of mobile computing? 
I welcome any comments on twitter, facebook or my blog :D



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