What’s the future of apps?

I love apps. There, I said it. My iPhone is my constant companion and I can’t seem to get enough applications for it. You can never have too many Twitter clients, restaurant finders or things that scan barcodes and rarely find the product, that’s my ethos. But I wonder what the future holds for apps. With greater smartphone penetration is coming a diversification in mobile operating systems, and so developing an iPhone app isn’t enough anymore, the relentless growth (and impending explosion) of Android being too strong to ignore. Add BlackBerry – no longer the sole preserve of the business community – into the mix, and with Windows Phone 7 looking pretty exciting, things are getting more complex.

So where does this leave the company wanting a smartphone app for their business? The current course of action seems clear – you work out what you want your app to do, engage a software firm or your internal developers if you have them, and off you go. You write something for iPhone, you re-cut in for Android, and for BlackBerry, and so on. On one level that’s all ok, if you’re prepared to put the work in and stomach the often-laborious and sometimes downright irritating and whimsical rules of app submission, validation and release. But then if you’ve got bug fixes, or every time you want to tweak a feature or add something new, you’re back to wheeling in the small army of developers, and going through the whole process again.

Of course this is great for the software firms and is doubtless uncovering developer talent that otherwise might ever have got into the game. But hang on a minute. Despite my app addiction, I’ve got some real worries about all of this. You see, I’m kind of fond of that little, essential part of our daily lives that seems to have got left by the wayside in this new world of app fantasy – the browser. And for companies who have invested sometimes huge sums of money into feature-rich websites, and with the advent of HTML5, I think there’s another way than the constant re-inventing of the app wheel.

HTML5 essentially renders browser plugins a things of the past, and with iPhone’s Safari for one already supporting it, I sense a potential shift in the corporate mobile app development spend of the next couple of years. No matter what size of business you are, your development costs of deploying your customer-facing functionality to multiple platforms and devices could be seriously cut by a new approach to development, and a move away from standalone apps by operating system to rich, fully featured HTML5 websites optimised for various devices. And as well as the obvious cost effect of this, the other upsides will immediately appeal to those who’ve been caught in the ‘app awaiting review’ nightmare of present – your website is totally under your control, and you can change it at will, whenever you want.

But companies still want their own little bit of real estate on the iPhone (and others) homepage, right? Absolutely, but it’s already easy to create a bespoke icon as a shortcut to your web app so that argument’s gone right away. And if you’re still adamant that you want to be in the App Store or Marketplace, or you don’t want the customer experience of clicking on your icon to essentially just fire up Safari, well, develop a simple browser branded as you want it, coded to point straight to your website, and you’ve got that one cracked. Maybe add in some offline capabilities so it’s not such a bad experience for those not connected, but other than that, you’re up there with the bespoke OS app.

Now I’m no developer so there’s no doubt a load of technical stuff I’ve not thought of in my simplistic mind, but in terms of allowing businesses of all size (and budgets) to get their functionality online, keeping the control of the functionality firmly with the company and allowing rapid access to a common look and feel across multiple platforms, I think the webapp (albeit potentially deployed from an appstore within a custom corporate wrapper) could just be the future.