Outside all the walled gardens is the mobile web

Everyone with an iPhone knows what an app is. They know what the app store is, and they know how to get new apps onto their phone. The app store model has been a remarkable success, with over one billion app downloads per month as of October 2011. But despite this, there are echoes of the walled gardens of the Internet in the 1990s, with companies such as AOL controlling exactly what content users could access. These walled gardens eventually came down when faced with competition from a more open web, and companies that didn’t adapt their business model suffered. Parallels with the current app store model are glaring, and have led some to argue that the app store model is just a fad, a blip in the progress of the open web.
The mobile web, then and now
Most iPhone users, and indeed Android and other smartphone users, probably don’t know that the mobile web existed before the iPhone’s debut in 2007. But it did. WAP, WML and iMode were some of the buzzwords of the day. It didn’t look much the way it does today, but it’s been around since the late 1990s.
The fact that the mobile web has taken a back seat is a testament to what a great job Apple did with iOS and the app store. The arrival of the iPhone in 2007 redefined how people interacted with their phones. Today, however, the web has all but caught up again. We need only look to some examples of the kinds of web apps that already exist today to see the web is poised to make its comeback. Just compare the native (app) and web versions of the Google’s Map application. Not only is it possible for the web version to sport a similar UI to the native version, but they also offer very similar location-aware functionality.