Google and Apple, once firm friends, now hover around one another like wary beasts. Each has a healthy awareness of the other’s strength and power; neither wants to be weakened. Both want to win.
YouTube webapp on iPhone
This week Google announced a new optimised version of its mobile YouTube site. YouTube is a big deal for Google, and despite many upstart competitors trying to steal the audience away, it remains the world’s biggest and best-known video sharing site.
Making it work on mobile devices is important. Mobile is the future of the web, and rapidly becoming its present as well, with over 75 million active mobile broadband accounts in the UK alone. Google’s future success depends on it ensuring that its web services and webapps work just as well on mobile devices as they do on the desktop.
“2010 is shaping up to be the year when internet users move decisively away from bulky machines to the mobile web.”
– Nic Fildes and Mike Harvey, Times Online, 1st January 2010
Enter Apple, current King of the mobile market. It turns out that no-one cares about all the things the iPhone can’t do, or doesn’t do very well – they just love the user experience it offers. So the iPhone continues to outsell its competitors.
The iPhone, of course, comes with a YouTube app built-in. It’s a leftover from the days when Apple and Google were on friendlier terms, but there it sits. And it’s pretty good.
But I think YouTube’s new optimised webapp is better. It’s just as quick as Apple’s app, it looks a bit better, and it even remembers my account details. Google has done a great job with it – without having to go through Apple’s approval process. Official Apple-approved apps have to be created using Apple’s developer tools, inside the walled garden of Apple’s developer programme. Webapps, by contrast, enjoy the freedom of the web itself. Apple has no control over that.
A webapp might not offer quite as slick an experience on the iPhone as an officially approved app, but the YouTube one proves that it can get pretty close. And the same webapp will work on dozens of other mobile devices, including those yet to come. Building a webapp is more efficient, and it’s cheaper. It will work on iPhones, Blackberries, Android phones, and all manner of other gadgets.
Of course, it depends what you’re making. Webapps depend on the infrastructure of the mobile phone network (or WiFi availability). Information-based Webapps work very well; highly interactive, graphic-intensive games will work better as native applications.
In a way it’s like the early days of the web all over again. Back then we had browser wars between Microsoft and Netscape; now we have platform wars, with Apple and Google the primary contenders. Building webapps that work on both platforms gives us developers the best of both worlds. And most importantly, it gives our clients a cost-effective alternative to an iPhone app.
