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.

Is time up for the brand website?

Today all brands large or small have a website of some sort. Some use it as a showcase of their wares, some to actively sell through, and some to offer customer care and to allow customers to serve themselves, minimising costs for the company and making things generally more convenient for the customer. In most cases, the amount of stuff you can do with the sites is getting ever more impressive. But is the brand website as the primary destination that companies expect their customers to come to still relevant? And will it be in, say, 3 to 5 years from now?

The last year or two has seen Facebook explode massively into the mainstream closely followed by Twitter et al, and smart mobile devices that you customise to meet your own personal needs have become more than just a niche geek toy. Lines of distinction between devices are blurring rapidly – is it a games console, or a web browser that can serve me video on demand? With all of this, having to physically visit a company’s website to do something is starting to look kind of, well, “dad in a disco” (to quote twitter.com/brookem). Sure, the portal explosion of the early noughties put things together into one place, aggregated news feeds and the like, but this was all very passive. We all went there, saw stuff, got wowed by being able to see the weather in New York and the latest Paris Hilton disaster, oh and there was a constant stream of banner ads desperate to whisk us off to somewhere else. With social media and multiple intelligent devices however has come interactivity, with brands actively engaging in conversation with their customers, (existing or prospective). And this is of course massively evident today. If I want to find out about a game, I don’t bother going to the EA’s website to find the info I want – Twitter will give me the answer, and if I want to ask Asos when they can sell me the Paul Smith suit as paraded on TV by some C-lister, do I go to their website? Of course not, I use Facebook.

So far so good – brands are already stepping firmly out of the comfort of their own sites. But extend it further and things fall down. If I want to check my bank balance, I still need to go to the HSBC website. If I want to book a flight I still need to go to easyjet.com. And – God forbid – should I need to attempt to get any support from my electricity company for a problem with my account then I absolutely am headed off to their site. So today, then, although there’s the tiny green shoots of change, the corporate website is indeed alive and well.

But I propose to you that it’s time is numbered.

People are becoming more and more accustomed to residing in just a handful of places on the web, served up in a way that suits them on the device of their choice, and there’s a growing expectation that information will come to them wherever they hang out. Surely, then, it’s a matter of time until that expectation extends to a demand that ALL the other services that they might need must come to where they are.

So, savvy companies should be starting to work out how they handle this shift. Is spending a fortune on beautiful looking websites with amazing functionality still relevant? Or is the technology pound better spent on building the underlying capabilities and functionalities that customers need and then making those features available, well, anywhere were the customer expects to see them? For me, this is the future of online brand presence. Whether you’re talking Facebook, mobile apps, widgets that are already starting to appear on Internet-connected TVs or whatever the environment of choice the web conjures up tomorrow, customers will increasingly make their choices about who they buy from and engage with based on how accessible that company is to them, and on their terms. Expect the customer to come to you and you’re essentially limiting your market. Extend rich information, sales and customer service functionality to reach customers where they hang out, and maximise the results.

Some companies have already started to get wise to this and are essentially pulling back their own websites as the be-all and end-all of their online existence – after all, why use display advertising to persuade someone to leave their preferred environment to come to you when you can take your offering directly to them? Why build hugely complex and impressive automated account management and customer service functions to then sit back and watch only a subset of your customer base use them? Why assume, in an arrogant way, that just because you’ve built it, they’re sure to come?

So my assertion is that as more and more brands build ever smarter and slicker online capabilities, it is the middle layer of technology that sits above their underlying systems capabilities, enabling the deployment of that functionality to multiple environments, that is the most critical part of their online investment. Chris Clarke at LBi (http://bit.ly/8IWPhv) talks about online capabilities being like an octopus – a central body where all the core stuff happens, but with multiple tentacles that take that functionality out to multiple environments, i.e. to wherever the customer fancies being served. And I tend to agree. Whilst time will certainly not be called on brand websites in the next year or two, the changing way that people are using the net – and the incredible pace of change – means that companies need to think seriously about this kind of investment now. A half-arsed iPhone app or off the peg Facebook app simply will not cut it. Those who take alternative online presence seriously, with rich and relevant functionality, will ultimately reap the rewards. Interactivity in multiple places is fast becoming no longer optional. And whilst today (and probably for a year or two still) people will be persuaded to come to you, there will fast come a point where they stop. Those who get with it quickest will ultimately be the winners.