Building Real Solutions: A Smart Approach to Mobile Apps
- June 22nd, 2011
- Posted by Ken in Fireside Web
Advances in mobile technology – like smartphones and tablets – have revolutionized the way people find and share information. The worldwide demand for these products has fueled the development of myriad applications (apps), a market worth tens of billions of dollars. Monetary worth aside, however, what value do these apps really provide? Too often the standard app is a marketing gimmick that provides only limited value for users.
Our clients on Capitol Hill have been asking how they can leverage the demand for apps to better connect with constituents. The idea is excellent – mobile devices are increasingly the medium through which individuals access the Web. But while many competitors in our software field promote the app as the latest and greatest in mobile products, at Fireside21, we feel the app fell short in many ways.
The primary deficiency of the app approach to mobile experience is the exceedingly fragmented nature of the growing “smart” device market. If one’s goal is to reach, influence or communicate with as many mobile users as possible, a single app can only offer limited ongoing value. Just examine the most recent US market share data above. An iPhone app, for instance, only reaches about 30% of the mobile marketplace. The last thing we’d recommend to one of our clients is to launch an app that limits their reach to a very specific demographic.
To understand the challenge, consider how an app works. Each smart device has its own distinct operating system (OS). This means the iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile and other devices all require different app designs to suit their respective OS. Such circumstances make a consistent user experience difficult to achieve, and managing several different apps with the same content can be as challenging as it is inefficient. Recognizing this and considering the need for a tool that re-syndicates website and other online content through a mobile device, we set to work to develop something better for our clients.
A real solution for how our clients could engage constituents through mobile devices required innovative thinking and the development of a new kind of mobile application. We spent a lot of time discussing, designing and overcoming this challenge. We brainstormed how mobile users might best access content through a mobile platform and what kind of versatility we could offer while maintaining one design that worked across any OS.
As often happens here, we created a new and better tool. The mobile solution we developed takes advantage of the latest HTML5 web technologies to maintain the look and feel of a touch-enabled app, but it works across all operating systems. What is more, it offers greater versatility, such as the ability to use transitions between pages and animation. In short, it is a more robust tool without the limits inherent in traditional apps. Our approach has already been validated as a better path by companies such as Facebook and the Financial Times who are both looking to extract themselves from proprietary app marketplaces.
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In working to create this new kind of mobile tool, we enjoyed the larger experience of thinking about how to make our services and products more comprehensive and inclusive. By weighing the challenge and looking for solutions that make it easier for legislators to communicate with constituents, we were able to develop a better product. This kind of an approach is what allows us to provide real solutions, that is, integrated products that offer long-term usefulness based on an ability to provide information in a valuable way.
While apps will continue to be a hot item in the mobile environment, they will remain a limited, often-gimmicky tool. As we tell our clients, if you’re looking for a way to make mobile tools work for you, we don’t have an app for that. We have something better.
