The App State of Mind

• August 28, 2010
• 10 notes

The other day I was chatting with my brothers about travel plans and trying to figure out if I could plan my trip to visit them around the opening of football season. To figure that out, we needed to know the fall schedule of the Cowboys and the University of Texas. Rather than launching Safari and Googling “Cowboys 2010 schedule” my first impulse was to go to the App Store and search for schedule apps.

I didn’t even think to download a general sports app like SportsTap, my first impulse was to search for an individual schedule app for each team. And guess what? I found them almost instantly and they now live in a “Sports” folder on the Home Screen of my iPhone.

Now, every time I want to schedule a trip to the Tap Room with friends, or let my wife know whether I’ll be available a particular Sunday afternoon, I’ll launch a single app and instantly find the content I need. And at the end of the football season I’ll just delete them.

Sure I could bookmark the schedules in Mobile Safari, or favorite the teams in an app like SportsTap, but doing so not only takes a lot more work to setup, it adds several mental and physical steps to accessing the content I want.

My Mobile Safari bookmarks are hopelessly cluttered. Depending on the most recent state, I might have to traverse up then back down several levels of folders to find the bookmark. Doing a new Google search each time would probably be faster than tracking down the bookmark (and that’s undoubtedly a factor in Google’s current and future mobile strategies. See: Mobile Apps: The Ultimate Threat to Search Engines?).

SportsTap could provide better UI for quickly viewing team schedules, but it’s optimized for what’s currently happening throughout the sports world, not looking weeks ahead. And that’s the thing about apps, each one went through some sort of design process that defined what content was relevant to the app and how users might want to view and interact with that content on a mobile device.

A web browser provides the opportunity for anyone to find just about any content ever created by man. Apps provide me an immediate and customized view of the content I care about on the web.

Desktop web browsers have and will continue to offer better and better ways to find, view, and act on content via bookmarks, keyboard shortcuts, plugins, and interesting new features like Panorama in Firefox 4, but trying to shoehorn the complexity and extensibility of a modern desktop web browser into a mobile platform would be challenging. And even if it were possible, UX would undoubtedly suffer.

It will be interesting to see user reaction to and adoption of Goole’s Chrome OS when it launches later this year. But Chrome OS isn’t a mobile browser, it’s a mobile OS build around a browser. “The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web.” Notice the use of the word “most”.

Now don’t get me wrong, the mobile browser and other apps that offer broad access to web content obviously serve a purpose in the mobile app ecosystem, but I’ve found myself using Mobile Safari less and less as I find apps that curate the bits of the web I care to access. And I’m not the only one.