Forget Mobile, the web is where it's at

This, for the most part has been surrounding the mobile platforms out there.  Apple’s i(Phone/Pad/Pod Touch) has been battling Google’s Android, Apple has been battling with Adobe over Flash, and then there’s the patent wars between Apple, Google, HTC and Microsoft.

It’s a pretty big fight.

So, what do developers do?  From a skills point of view we want to be aligned with the most popular platform that will give us the most marketability – yet from a business point of view we want our applications to work on as many platforms as possible to maximise the ‘attack surface’ in the various markets out there and gain the most revenue.

Then there’s the different markets – Apple have their draconian approval process, but provide the class leading App Store, whereas Google is all about free-love and sell it how you want.

Then there’s the platforms.  Objective-C, Java, Regular C, Flash etc etc etc etc.  The list goes on.

So what are we developers to do – how are we supposed to navigate through this minefield of options?  Well, it’s pretty simple actually:

Ignore it.

Every mobile phone manufacturer is striving to produce a browser on their phone that can view the whole web in a similar way to a desktop computer, and all are striving to support the latest and greatest.  Therefore, surely the easiest way for us web developers to bring an application to a phone is to simply look at it through a browser?

Picture this, you have an application out there in the wild, you want it to work on the iPhone, so use Safari – job done.  It’ll also work on Android with no changes, and is also not dependant on Apple’s approval or anything else, you can do it how you want. Additionally, with libraries like JQTouch you can access phone hardware should you want to.

But OK, this isn’t ideal for all situations.  You won’t have offline access as such, you won’t be able to build games, you won’t get amazing performance – but for the most part, that’s not a big trade off for most business focused applications.

So, in short, why are we worrying about learning all these different tools to make our applications available on different mobile platforms, when we are already expert in the single tool that will make our app truly cross platform – the good old world wide web…