IMO none of this solves the biggest problem with phones - they are not made capable of handling even a basic business app, and mobile web apps are great but not always practical.

Allow me to give a simple example. This tech info comes from Companionlink, a company which specializes in connectors between phone apps and desktop CRM's. Although what I am about to say I knew prior to speaking with them, they lend weight for the skeptics that may abound.

Originally Blackberry phones were designed for business. Blackberry thought that the video and music and emerging social networking would be a cool addition, but hardly the main purpose of a smartphone. Then of course the exact opposite came true; phone sales are almost exclusively for what I call the teeny-bopper junk. So long Blackberry.

What made a phone business friendly? Let's take a look at a simple area - contacts. Android phones are designed to have your personal contacts, maybe up to a couple hundred (Google fact stated to Companionlink). After that, just doing a simple search to call somebody can be frustrating. But the browser is "fast." they advertise.

A business oriented smartphone, i.e. the former Blackberry could handle 10-20,000 contacts without breaking a sweat. Most businessmen I knew then had at least 5000 contacts and sync's them with their office CRM. There literally is no phone device that can handle this most simple of business tasks.

Ahah, you say! Disconnected apps? Phooeey! Just use the phone's browser to connect to your office's CRM and operate the CRM remotely from your phone.

Rarely practical with any kind of substabtial CRM. The performance and variety of data make operating in a browser frustrating. In fact, Companionlink has capitalized on that and does a huge and booming business syncing to everything from Outlook on up to real CRM's. Large companies, busy businessmen, all need quick and easy access to data -- not possible via a phone.

All of this describes the main problem of all software in our time: the conclict between personal "teeny-bopper" type use and serious professional use. MS cannot decide, so they try and have both and often fail. Apple dumped the business end and stuck with those wanting an "iLife". Samsung is desparately trying to be like Apple. Linux has a lot of capabilities for the business/professional side, but has yet to achieve mainstream desktop acceptance.

A few years ago a rep from MS spoke at Southwest Fox previewing Windows 8. One of the SWF speakers actually walked out on her speech, but I asked her "what about business apps?" You see, she spent the entire time talking about app stores and sharing recipes. She initially ducked my question, but when I persisted she admitted MS had nothing for business in W8. She desparagingly called them "oh yeah, those line of business applications" and said stick with W7.

Yet when MS releases server products, they try and tout the business capabilities -- except when they mess up.

So all this mobile/phone app talk ignores the underlying problem of how to address the teeny-boppers and the professionals alike. First the pendulum swung one way, towards business, now it has swung back, who knows if it will swing again, or how many times before we achieve a resolution to the problem of serving two vary diverse groups of people.





>There are a number of reasons for the more and 'boring' nature of Phone announcements. We're coming out of the 'discovery' phase into the 'mainstream' phase. Phones have been around long enough that few people think of it as something exciting or revolutionary (even though it surely is). A lot of the the low hanging fruit for productivity have been picked and now we're in consolidation and optimization modes - incremental improvements.
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>I think this likely means there'll be all sort of little UI feature twiddling which if anything will make the fragmentation between platforms even worse as each vendor tries to set themselves apart of 'usability'.
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>As you point out this could be to the advantage of the Web as the unifying platform. Nobody *wants* to build 3 or 4 apps and but if you do native that's exactly what you have to do. Web apps don't have to deal with this, but then again there's also the expectation to deliver similar UI experience and integration.
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>Google is being smart about this actually - they're actually building their UI platform both as a native and as an HTML platform (Material Design) so you can end up with the same experience in both. Even the paradigms used in markup/layout are similar so it's easy to switch between them.
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>I think something like this will be where we're headed. There will be UI frameworks that are more high level than the specific phone platforms. More sophisticated then the crude frameworks we have today like Bootstrap that still leave most customization to the user.
>
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>There's also a big misconception of who needs an app vs who is served just fine with a Mobile Web app. Consumer facing mainstream apps certainly are candidates for native apps today, but there's no reason for a business application used in-house to be in an app store as a native app. In fact that's asking for extra mainteance overhead with almost no benefit.
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>
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>Like I set earlier in the thread - lots of things in the air that have the potential to really shake things up in the next year or so.
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>+++ Rick ---
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>
>>Ryan,
>>
>>Thanks for the heads up - did not show up on my radar screen!
>>
>>Took some time to think about it, and came up with a quite opposite view. All what follows is a personal interpretation.
>>
>>Last month Apple announced a huge increase of iPhone 6 sales on the Asian markets. So far the market deal was clear: iPhone for the upper end, Android for the lower end, with ambitions upwards. 2 years ago, Android was supposed to kick Apple out of the market like Microsoft once did.
>>
>>Now Google sees the opposite scenario happen, and realizes that consumers have no compelling reason for buying an Android, except price - and price has never been a compelling reason, just a non-choice.
>>
>>So Google tries to clone what made Apple's success: keynotes with wahoo effect (or still learning to on the video … 'do you want to see it live?' - question never asked in an Apple presentation, just because there is no need to ask). Did you notice that the 2 co-presenters are probably Asians, as the targeted audience?
>>
>>'Now on Tap' is an attempt to attract consumers, and tie up app developers into the Android eco-system.
>>This is fine for consumer apps, what is the impact for business apps?
>>
>>There are 2 main differences between consumer and business apps: features and numbers.
>>- features: today all consumers around the world tend to behave the same (globalization) and, consequently, expect the same features: one app can target billions of people; this provides enough momentum ($) to develop one application per platform: mw, ga and ai*.
>>Conversely, businesses on different markets (activity and country) have varying needs; moreover, some companies seek differential advantages in their IT - they don't want to share features with their competitors.
>>- numbers: this feature patchwork narrows the number of target companies and users for a given app, except very broad, horizontal and narrow functions (like CRM, time tracking etc.) - too little $ to develop platform-specific ERPs at an affordable cost.
>>
>>Economically, business apps require a standard client environment.
>>
>>This has been the only reason why Windows has become standard and nearly a monopoly: because Windows specs and APIs were public, business app tools came on windows (dBase contributing a lot), then business apps, then the huge market of business users, and finally the consumer market.
>>Anyone over 50 can remember this clearly.
>>
>>Is there any chance that this scenario replays?
>>Certainly no, because the mobile consumer (B2C) market has emerged before the business (B2B) market, just the opposite of what happened 30 years ago. And consumers are sensitive to fashion and marketing, not standards, just because standards don't provide consumer any benefit, not even a significant cost reduction.
>>And because the consumer market is so huge that the app makers can develop and maintain as many version as the number of platforms.
>>In some sense, platforms fragmentation provide the bigger players an even higher barrier of entry against new players - so, and this is a paradox, companies that are established on the consumer market (like Facebook and others) do have a objective interest in addressing a variety of platforms.
>>
>>So everything seems to indicate that the mobile device market will remain fragmented, and there will be no chance to see once a (free) standard client environment except the browser.
>>
>>That's why business apps have no other choice than move to the browser.
>>
>>PS: as business app developers, we've always believed that our needs were prominent on the IT market. This is longer been true since roughly 2005: IT are now dedicated to the consumer market, and every announcement should be considered in this perspective.
>>
>>All what precedes is a personal interpretation.
>>
>>>Thierry, something else to consider:
>>>
>>>What Google just announced at its IO conference is a bombshell for the future of the company. For years the search giant has witnessed the chipping away of its core product — search — due to the rise of mobile applications and their siloed-off experiences. Users are engaging more and more with programs that have no attachment or often need for search on the broad web, and as a result Google's position as the owner of our habits, interests, and needs on the internet has looked increasingly at risk....
>>>
>>>[Today] the company demoed a new feature of its Android OS which allows its Now service (a dashboard of notifications focused on your life and interests) to plug in as a layer that essentially hovers above any app running on your phone or tablet. Activated by the home button, it's always there. This means that you can get contextual search information around almost anything you're doing, provided there is text and data that Google can pull from the app itself. And the best part is that developers won't have to make any changes to their existing software to allow the new service — dubbed Now on Tap — to bring search and context into the user's view.
>>>
>>>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-28/what-google-just-announced-is-a-bombshell
>>>
>>>Another acknowledgement of the increasing footprint of non-browser apps on devices, this time by the producer of the dominant device OS. Apart from search, this will make it easier for all sorts of different apps to interact without their developers having to program (or customers pay for) a big Rube Goldberg exercise: exactly the sort of "black boxing" that IT needs to be delivering for its customers. I realize the purpose is to keep Google in the driver's seat but this is an example of vendor and customer interests being aligned, just like Microsoft in the 1990s.