Mobile App Testing

The big decision in mobile development right now is whether to go the route of native app or HTML5. If you’ve arrived at this fork in road, then you might appreciate these rules of thumb from CNET.com. Take a look:

If the majority of a site’s traffic is side door traffic from Google, Facebook, and Twitter, the site should embrace mobile web and HTML5. Since most of the site’s users are arriving via links, the content must quickly load in the mobile browser. Such sites include music lyrics sites such as our site MetroLyrics and other types of information look up sites.

If a majority of a site’s traffic is direct but intermittent traffic–meaning users come directly to the site, but only once in a while–the site should implement HTML5 mobile Web. These types of sites are “tourist sites” that are not visited regularly by people and therefore users are very unlikely to download an app. Such sites include corporate websites such as my company’s CBSi.com homepage.

While HTML5 has come a long way, it is still not up to par with the native app experience. Some publishers, such as the Financial Times and Playboy, have come close to native app functionality by investing heavily in HTML5 in order to bypass Apple’s 30 percent app store subscription fee. However, there are no turnkey JavaScript libraries that provide functionality such as efficient swiping and offline reading.

In summary, when discussing your mobile strategy, use the type of traffic your site has to determine whether to use HTML5 mobile Web or native apps, and then use your level of budget to decide whether to go turnkey or custom. And have some fun with your apps and please let me now what’s worked for you.

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VentureBeat started a recent article in its DevBeat stream with a very bold statement: “The mobile app is going the way of the CD-ROM: To the dustbin of history.” It’s not an unfounded, out of left field, shock and awe statement either. They’ve found quite a few big industry names to that are preaching the virtues of mobile web apps and HTML5 over native apps. Here’s what DevBeat has to say:

“Forget being in love with the open web and all that touchy-feely stuff.”

Jay Sullivan is Mozilla’s vice president of products, and for a spokesperson of one of the open web’s dearest darlings, he’s on a tear.

“If you want to have a variety of mobile apps, it gets expensive… that’s a lot of apps to build,” he told VentureBeat in a recent interview.

Sullivan is making a strong case against building native apps and for the mobile web as the new platform to (literally) end all platforms.

Now, a number of developments make his words especially timely. Yahoo has just announced Yahoo Cocktails, a set of tools for developers to use that make web apps look and behave more like native apps. Mozilla is working on tools to help developers sell web-based apps to mobile device users, enabling them to make profits just as developers in the iTunes App Store or Android Market can now do.

Even Adobe is scrapping Flash for mobile phones and pinning its hopes on HTML 5 for the mobile web. “HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively,” wrote Danny Winokur, Adobe VP and General Manager of Interactive Development.

“This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.”

It looks like mobile apps may be headed the same direction as multimedia CD-ROMs did a decade ago. Sadly for mobile apps, they don’t even have a useful second life as drink coasters.

Read the whole story at VentureBeat’s DevBeat (be sure to keep reading past the large, bold headers – they’re part of the overall story) >>>

What do you think? Will mobile web apps crush native apps soon? Ever? Leave us a comment and let us know!

There’s a lot of talk these days about HTML5, specifically in regards to the web and what it means for the future of video. Did you not get the memo?

“Dear Desloper (Designer+Developer) community, HTML5 has introduced a <video> tag and all you need to do is give the source of your file and it will play videos in all the browsers and devices of the universe.”

Can it really be that easy? Nope. As the saying goes, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” – and the same applies to embedding video in HTML5.

The popularity of HTML5 becomes more and more important with the way arch-rivals Adobe and Apple get along with each other. The miserable deslopers start looking for an alternative to Flash to play video on Apple devices. HTML5 – and its <video> tag – is therefore seen as somewhat of a savior. No Flash or Quicktime to play a video? Where do I sign up?

However, with different parties supporting different video standards, the desloper community needs to keep in mind that they need to encode video into different formats so that various browsers can understand their video format.

For converting the video to iPhone, Apple provides a tool named Quick Time Pro which you can buy (or let your generous boss pay for it) for conversion purposes. Quick Time Pro will make your life easy to convert your video (Quick time format) file into MP4 which you can play on iPhone for both web and desktop applications.

The fun starts when you have to play H.264 video format in Mozilla Firefox (my favorite browser and probably most developers’ favorite too).

Read more…

From TechCrunch:

A week after launching the official release of Firefox 4, Mozilla is following up today with Mobile Firefox for Android and Maemo phones (for all twelve of you Maemo fans out there). For Android, the browser is now available on the Android Market,.

The Android browser fairly rocks. It almost makes me want to switch to Android. The mobile browser syncs all of your bookmarks, browsing history, passwords, and even open tabs with your Firefox browser on your desktop. So you can pick up browsing where you left off when you leave your desk. This syncing is huge. The browser won’t be availabl for the iPhoen anytime soon because of restrictions Apple places on browsing apps—for one thing, it doesn’t use Webkit. (But Mozilla does offer an iPhone app that syncs mobile Safari with your Firefox desktop browser).

One thing Firefox mobile doesn’t have is support for Flash, even though Android has a big partnership with Adobe to make Flash work on mobile. I spoke with some folks from Mozilla yesterday about this topic. Eventually, Firefox mobile will support Flash, but it is just not there yet in terms of responsiveness. The focus right now is on HTML5 and CSS. It is amazing some of the 3D effects, animations, video, and other in-browser graphics you can now get with HTML5. Check out some of the demos here after you download Firefox to your phone.

Read the read of the article >>>

2010 was a big year for Facebook: its dominance asserted with the capitulation of one-time competitors such as MySpace, hitting the 500 million users milestone, movies, Man-of-the-Year CEO…With such highs, it’s hard to speculate what 2011 holds for Facebook – but you don’t need a crystal ball to see one area of intense focus will be in the mobile industry.

At the recent Inside Social Apps conference at UC San Francisco, Facebook Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor the company is concentrating heavily on acquisitions. Location-based products and payment services would be areas of focus for Facebook, but it seemed that the main area to watch for 2011 was mobile.

“Mobile is the primary focus for our platform this year,” he said.

While the mobile industry presents challenges, there are greater rewards. 200 million people currently access Facebook on mobile devices. This user segment is twice as active as their desktop counterparts and is growing faster than any other. Mobile’s “inherent engineering challenge”, as Taylor put it, lies in the fact that any update has to suit the many different mobile platforms operating today.

Taylor did confirm, however, that Facebook were putting a huge amount of resources into HTML5.

“HTML5 is the future platform,” he said.

Having recently raised $1.5 billion with the help of Goldman Sachs, the Facebook coffers are full – and it looks like they are putting their money where their mouth is, with the recent acquisition of ad start-up Rel8tion, which will improve hyper-local ad targeting to its mobile subscribers. Hyper-local ads, popularized by Groupon’s local deals, could be integral to Facebook’s plan for generating income through its Facebook Deals geo-location service.

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“The future is bright for Flash,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. “I hope it sticks around for decades to come. I really respect those guys over at Adobe.”

Kidding, kidding. According to this recent Wired story, what he really said was that Flash will KILL the mobile web if left to its own devices (no pun intended).

(UPDATE: Apple Facing Antitrust Inquiry Over Flash-to-iPhone Complier Ban?)

We’ve covered this before, and Stanton Champion wrote an excellent contrarian piece on this subject titled 5 Reasons Flash Is Here To Stay, but these latest developments highlight a new level of animosity that we just couldn’t resist. That, plus it has some major mobile testing implications. Here’s a telling excerpt from the Wired piece:

But the new public remarks echo some he made in private at a recent Apple Town Hall meeting where he disparaged Adobe as “lazy.” Now the Apple CEO says he has many technical and philosophical problems with Flash — six, to be precise — which would appear to make their differences irreconcilable.

“Flash was created during the PC era — for PCs and mice,” Jobs writes. “Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low-power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards — all areas where Flash falls short.”

Here is Steve Job’s entire blog post, where he discusses mobile usability, video formatting, mobile security and other topics near and dear to today’s mobile testers.

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