Mint app finally gets tablet update | [Nothing But Tablets]

Mint app finally gets tablet update

Written by Bryan Faulkner on 24 February 2012 at 14:27

One of the great things about the internet has been the way its changed how we handle our money. There really isn’t a need to balance a checkbook anymore when you can have instant access to your accounts online. Want to know your current savings account balance? Check your banks website. Want to know the APR of you credit card? Check the credit card companies website. Wondering if your friend sent you that money through PayPal? Use the mobile app and find out. You get my point. There is almost nothing you can’t do with your money online, with the actual exception of getting some of the cold hard variety. For that you still need to visit an ATM or I guess you can get it at a merchant that will give you cash back. Either way you can’t get cash directly from the internet.

With so many different money related accounts that I can access online, I went looking for a way to track them all in one place. I didn’t know if this was possible because it would require really good security and the trust from all the individual banks to allow a third party into their system. I was pleasantly surprised that there was a couple different websites that did exactly what I was looking for and the best part was they were free. Hit the break to find out why I chose Mint.com.

After some research I decided to give Mint.com a try. I checked out it’s security and found it had as good as, if not better, encryption standards than most banks. It also had a long list of approved banking institutions that had given Mint access to their website. As I looked deeper I realized it wasn’t just banks with your savings and checking accounts and credit card companies that Mint could interface with, but a whole host of money related accounts from mortgages and car loans to investment accounts. I figured if all these banks gave Mint access to their system, it must be safe. I decided to give Mint a try.

After signing up you have to go through the initial process of adding all your accounts in which is usually just a matter of finding your bank and adding in your sign in information. They made it as simple as possible, and once you have your information entered it usually pulls all of your information needed without a hitch. If it’s your bank it will grab any savings accounts, checking accounts, loans or other accounts you have, so you don’t have to do each type of account separately. Once you have all your accounts entered you can pretty much sit back and let Mint do all the work for you.

Mint will track your spending based on categories, either predefined ones, or custom ones you create. It’s smart software so it learns that if you enter that a certain type of transaction is always a car payment, it will do it automatically for you. The only time it can’t do this is for checks you have written, and that’s because it doesn’t know where it was written to, just that it was withdrawn from your account. You can setup any number of budget categories you want, and see up to date info on how much you have spent in each category. It will give you some pretty neat looking pie or bar graphs so you can visually see where your money is going. It’s a really great tool to track all of your finances rather painlessly.

Now you might be saying that all that is great, but why are you writing about this on a tablet site? Well I’m about to get to that. I have been using Mint for a while, and of course I have the mobile apps for my phone and tablet. It gives me instant access to all my accounts wherever I am. However the tablet app was severely lacking in the function department. They didn’t have a separate app for tablets, so I was stuck with the phone version, which we all know never translates well to larger screens. You were stuck using it in portrait mode, and it just wasn’t very pretty. All that changed with the last update.

There is now a dedicated tablet app, and I was very surprised opening it up after the update. I usually don’t check the change logs for most of my apps when they get updated, so I don’t know what’s different until I open it up. The first thing I noticed was that it didn’t immediately jump to portrait mode. And then I saw the beautiful graphs and new layout. I noticed they did a very nice job laying everything out on the main page. You can see the home page in the screen shots below, obviously with all my personal information removed.

There was immediate access to any information I might want. It has my top spending categories listed with how much I have spent, a pie chart showing the breakdown of all my expenses, my current cash to debt ratio, and my total net worth. It also shows me how far into the month I am, and how much of my budget is left. With a quick swipe of the pie chart it brings up a graph showing my spending over the last 6 months so I can see if anything is out of whack. I can tap on any part to get more detailed information and quickly access my account list. Tapping on the spending categories takes you to more pretty pie charts that breaks down each category even farther. Basically just about anything you want to know about your expenses at any given time is right there at your fingertips. Kudos to Mint for making an app that is designed, and designed well, for tablets.

[Mint]

via Mint app finally gets tablet update | [Nothing But Tablets].

Paypal Ready to Fail Again | The Smartphone Champ

PAYPAL READY TO FAIL AGAIN

Paypal has done away with the NFC capabilities of their app they just added last year.  For those that may not be aware, last year Paypal released a new form of peer to peer Paypal payments that allowed you to pay someone buy tapping your phone against their phone.  I said it then and I’ll say it now, that was and is a stupid idea.  I don’t want to tap my phone to pay my friend who’s standing in front of me, and I’d think most people would echo my sentiments.  Unsurprisingly that functionality was a massive failure and Paypal has now pulled out of the NFC race.  Instead now Paypal wants to move forward with a mobile payment solution that does not involve the use of NFC.  Their concern with NFC is that retailers with NFC capable terminals are not very widespread yet.  Paypal’s vision instead is for you to be able to go to the checkout counter, select Paypal as a payment option, input your phone number and then a pin, and then your purchase is complete.  A receipt would then be emailed to you.  While this may sound nice in theory, Paypal would still face the exact same problem NFC faces today, there wouldn’t be very many retailers with compatible terminals.  I don’t see very many retailers going out and upgrading terminals just for Paypal.  Chalk this one up as another Paypal effort that will fail miserably.

Source:  Wall Street Daily

via Paypal Ready to Fail Again | The Smartphone Champ.

The history od mobile applications stores

Goodbye Wallet!!!

HTML5 Please – Use the new and shiny responsibly

Use the new and shiny responsibly.

Look up HTML5, CSS3, etc features, know if they are ready for use, and if so find out how you should use them – with polyfills, fallbacks or as they are

via HTML5 Please – Use the new and shiny responsibly.

The Pros and Cons of Cross-Platform App Design

The Pros and Cons of Cross-Platform App Design

February 16, 2012 by Christina Warren

The Mobile App Trends Series is supported by Sourcebits, a leading product developer for mobile platforms. Sourcebits offers design and development services for iOS, Android, Mobile and Web platforms. Follow Sourcebits on Twitter for recent news and updates.

In 2011, having a mobile strategy shifted from “nice to have” to “must have” for businesses of all sizes. In 2012, that same shift is taking place when it comes to supporting multiple mobile platforms. Sure, some companies can focus on just one operating system and exclude all others, but most businesses and brands need to target myriad device types. It’s no longer enough to just have an iPhone app — even small and medium sized businesses need to have a plan to support iPad, Android phones, the Amazon Kindle, larger Android tablets, Windows Phone and BlackBerry.

Developing for all of these platforms is a challenge, especially for the developer or business with limited resources. Fortunately, an entire sub-industry of development tools and languages exist to help solve this problem. Enter the cross-platform mobile framework.

Cross-platform frameworks — which include Appcelerator’s Titanium, Rhodes and PhoneGap — are designed to limit the work that a developer or development team has to put in to creating apps for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and beyond.

As with any development strategy, there are pros and cons to taking a cross-platform approach to mobile application design and development.

NBC’s iOS and Android apps are built using Appcelerator’s Titanium platform.

Pros of Cross-Platform Frameworks

The idea behind most cross-platform frameworks is to limit development time by having users write their code in one language that can easily be compiled to multiple platforms.

To do this, most frameworks allow users to write apps in a dynamic programming language (JavaScript is the most common, though many frameworks also support Ruby or Python), rather than in Objective-C/Cocoa, Java or C#/.NET. The frameworks will then compile against the native libraries of a specific platform and spit out an app for each platform the developer targets.

The pros of using a cross-platform framework:

Code Is Reusable: Rather than having to write the specific action or sequence for each platform, a developer can just write the code once and then reuse those bits in later projects or on other platforms.

Plugins: Major frameworks, including Appcelerator and PhoneGap offer easy access to plugins and modules that can easily plug into other services or tools.

Easy for Web Developers: Because most frameworks are dynamic or scripting languages, they are easy for web developers to jump in and use. Moreover, most frameworks also support HTML5 and CSS3 alongside the calls to more native functions.

Reduced Development Costs: This is perhaps the biggest advantage because it allows companies or brands to get an app onto other platforms without having to invest in a team or developer specific to that ecosystem.

Support for Enterprise and Cloud Services: In addition to plugins and modules for specific functions, most frameworks also have the option to directly integrate with cloud services, including Salesforce.com, AWS, Box.net and others.

Easy Deployment: Deploying and compiling apps is much faster in a cross-platform scenario. This is especially true with many of the new cloud-based build tools that various frameworks are starting to push out.

Cons of Cross-Platform Frameworks

Of course, using a cross-platform framework development strategy isn’t always the ideal solution. Some of the cons include:

The Framework Might Not Support Every Feature of an Operating System or Device: If Google, Apple or Microsoft adds a new feature, the framework you are using will need to be updated to support those new additions.

You Can’t Always Use Your Own Tools: Most frameworks want users to use their own development tools and suites, and that can mean that a developer has to forgo his or her own IDE preferences and use something else. PhoneGap (which Adobe acquired last summer) is different in this regard, in that it uses the native IDE for each platform it supports (XCode for iOS, Eclipse for Android, Visual Studio for Windows Phone)

Code Might Not Run as Fast: The cross-compilation process can sometimes be slower than using native tools and calls for an app.

High-End Graphics and 3D Support is Often Limited: Fortunately, game-centric development platforms, like Unity are here to help fill in those gaps.

Vendor Lock-In: Most of the cross-platform frameworks build using their own subsets of JavaScript, which means that if you want to switch to another platform, that code you wrote before is likely not going to be reusable without a lot of work.

Design Considerations

One major factor that cross-platform developers need to be aware of — whether you use a framework or not — is app design. Designing an app for the iPhone is different than designing one for Android; The UI and UX conventions are different, and touch points and menus work in different ways.

A good cross-platform application looks at home on whatever platform it is used on. A bad cross-platform tries to look identical everywhere. For instance, if your Android app has navigation controls at the bottom of the screen, iPhone style, you’re doing it wrong.

Interaction design guru Josh Clark wrote a fantastic article detailing design considerations for major mobile and tablet platforms for .net Magazine that every app developer should read.

via The Pros and Cons of Cross-Platform App Design.

Why corporate mobile banking is scary

http://www.ababj.com/tech-topics-plus/why-corporate-mobile-banking-is-scary-2689.html

By John Ginovsky

In its December report on the emergence of corporate mobile banking, Celent wrote that “a slew of new devices, cheaper data plans, and faster networks are upon us. Business mobile users have the opportunity to take advantage of rich and powerful mobile banking services, provided their bank has an offering,” Sound pretty good. But the report, “Corporate Mobile Banking: Revolutionizing Cash Management,” authored by Jacob Jegher, also raises red flags about security.

ABA Banking Journal Tech Topics recently spoke with Jegher about the report’s finding, particularly emerging security issues.

Tech Topics: What’s the difference between corporate and retail mobile banking?

Jacob Jegher: Corporate mobile banking isn’t for everyone. It’s meant for a specific profile of user. Retail banking services, what you and I would use, is meant for the masses. Anybody can pick it up and benefit. For example, if you spend your day working in accounts receivable or accounts payable, sitting in front of a computer, you have no use for corporate mobile banking.

But if you’re a senior executive who has decision-making capabilities for the business and you need to act on things on the move, corporate mobile banking is for you. The types of positions that would apply would be CFOs and treasurers, senior vice presidents, and vice presidents who would be in charge of finance or money movement. That would be the key difference.

Following along those same lines, the functionality in the corporate space, whether it’s online or mobile, the bank has to have an entitlements structure hierarchy, or things that require separation of user tasks. If you are an employee in operations, you may have authority to send a wire payment up to $1,000, for example. The moment you cross $1,000, you’re required to get approval by someone else up the chain. The work flow to follow these payment approvals have to be built in. Anything involved in decision-making is key. Payment approvals, positive pay, exception items, those types of things would be really critical to corporate mobile.

TT: Your report warns against an upcoming explosion of fraud attempts as corporate mobile takes hold. What would cause such an explosion?

Jegher: Right now there’s little or no fraud in corporate mobile banking, but there are a few things that would cause it to explode.

The first would be prevalence. If this starts to be adopted by the large financial institutions, there’s a lean towards high-value payments by fraudsters. Folks like you and me, we tend to send low-value payments as consumers. But [corporate mobile may involve] very large high-value payments, [and] access to wire transfer capability. Of course, separation of duties will prevent security challenges. But anything that has high value payments attached to it is attractive to a fraudster. It’s quite dangerous.

Also, just the relative freshness of the mobile channel is something that’s really uncharted as far as fraud goes. There have been some instances in the consumer space, but very little. It’s simply only a matter of time before we see rampant, rampant attempts at fraud as mobile becomes more prevalent, whether it’s consumer or corporate.

TT: What new forms of authentication are more appropriate for corporate mobile banking, and would business customers accept them?

Jegher: The first point I want to make is that authentication alone is pretty much useless. The key for any infrastructure is to have a layered environment with different bits of security, so that in the event that piece A fails or is broken, piece B is a safety net. Authentication alone is not good enough.

As far as authentication itself goes, hard tokens will eventually be a thing of the past. You won’t have the token necklaces some people now wear when they have multiple relationships with different clients. You can have something called a soft token, where you may have an app that runs on a mobile device that provides that one-time pass.

The other option is to forego the whole one-time issue and look at other things. An examples I give in the report is a gesture-based authentication, where in order to authenticate yourself you draw a pattern on the screen by connecting different dots. You can force a user to use a strong pattern by connecting the dots, and that strong pattern is a method of authentication.

Eventually we may get to things like voice authentication, as the use of voice becomes more prevalent in the market.

The question about balancing the burden on the customer versus the security of the solution, those two examples are very nonburdensome. [Customers] are not required to carry any hardware.

http://www.celent.com/reports/corporate-mobile-banking-revolutionizing-cash-management

via Why corporate mobile banking is scary.

NFC vs. cloud-based payments: Which will reach scale first?

By Chantal Tode

---

February 14, 2012

Google has suspended new prepaid cards for Google Wallet

Following a flurry of announcements around NFC-enabled mobile payments last year from Google and Isis, there has been very little news on the NFC front so far this year while cloud-based payments such as is offered by PayPal appear to be picking up some steam.

Google’s NFC-enabled mobile wallet took a hit this week when the company said it would suspend new prepaid cards for Google Wallet after security flaws were detected in the app that make users’ information vulnerable. At the same, there is growing interest in cloud-based solutions that address some of the issues with NFC but have their own issues as well but, will it last?

“There is momentum behind cloud-based solutions,” said Lara Albert, senior director of global marketing at Globys, Seattle. “But I wouldn’t count NFC out yet – you have some of the biggest players in mobile behind these services,” she said.

“I think people are realizing that there are alternatives to waiting for NFC and Secure Element chips to be embedded in all of the mobile phones,” she said. “Solutions that do not require large infrastructure investments such as merchants having POS terminals capable of communicating with an NFC enabled mobile handset to carry out purchase transactions have their advantages.

 

“Then again, let’s face it, if or when Apple’s next iPhone contains an NFC chip in it, the whole game changes.”

Ecosystem issues
Companies are beginning to take a closer look at cloud-based solutions because they want to hurry along the potential in mobile payments and NFC may be moving too slowly for their taste.

Google Wallet and Isis – a joint venture of Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA and AT&T – were both introduced with a lot of fanfare. However, nothing is likely to happen on the Isis front until April, when its two test markets in Austin, TX, and Salt Lake City, UT, go live.

Google is dealing with limited availability.

Currently, Google Wallet is only available on Samsung Galaxy Nexus phones from Sprint. However, once the Google deal to acquire Motorola goes through, new phones with Google Wallet could be out by the end of the year.

“Everybody is out there thinking about how to leverage mobile and most of it has ecosystem issues,” said Mark Beccue, senior analyst at ABI Research, New York.

“Making purchases on a smartphone through a Web site or an app – that is rolling along and growing pretty well,” he said.

“Proximity payments, whether software based or online – these are moving slowly. What we really need to see this year for the momentum to carry on is handsets that have the wallets loaded.

Part of the problem around NFC is the complexity associate with it as a payments option.

There are a lack of standards and a complex ecosystem of stakeholders, which makes NFC a more expensive proposition.

As a result, cloud-based solutions make look more appealing.

“I think that more companies are looking at cloud-based payment options,” Globys’ Ms. Albert said. “In a way they have been forced to look at alternative enablers that have the potential to accelerate adoption of mobile payment systems.

“The cloud-based payment solutions that require only downloadable applications for both consumers and retailers may make things easier,” she said. “I suspect there may be more openness toward security and payment card credentials being stored in the cloud rather than having to store and manage the credentials in the consumer’s mobile device.”

Retail strategy
Still, Google is a formidable player and has built up a strong retail strategy.

Google Wallet is available at a number of retailers in five markets – including Subway, CVS and Walgreens. Together, these retailers have a significant number of retail outlets.

“Google knew they could not control too much of the handset stuff right now but they could be smart about getting the right retail partners, which they have done,” ABI’s Mr. Beccue said.

“They went out and got Subway, CVS and Walgreens,” he said. “Most consumers are going to run across a CVS, Walgreens or Subway as they go about their day – that was a good strategy.

While is also looking to create a strong retail strategy, it faces its own challenges as well.

“PayPal is totally dependent on the quality of the mobile network in those places,” Mr. Beccue said. “In a very busy cell, or somewhere rural, the speed of getting things done is going to be dependent on the network.

“PayPal has some momentum,” he said. “What will be interesting is if, over a 6 month period, to see what the market acceptance is. If it does not work fast, that will be the determining factor.

The challenge both solutions face is getting enough consumers to adopt them for a meaningful reach.

To reach scale, these experiences have to be convenient, easy, and worthwhile from the standpoint of having enough participating merchants.

The key will be delivering personalized, relevant communications based on knowing, for example, that a user has registered in the last 14 days but has yet to make a purchase.

“Enabling mobile wallet providers to identify the contexts associated with certain behaviors, access real-time contextual profiles of customers, take action when a customer enters a context, predict the likelihood a customer will enter a context, and recommend the right tip, information, alert, incentive, etc. given a customer’s context is what is needed to minimize the fall out and get more people using a mobile payment option,” Ms. Albert said.

Running Toward Mobile Payments | Backbase Blog

Running Toward Mobile Payments

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Sara Palmbush

The idea of being able to send and receive payments with mobile phones has been around for many, many years. Except it’s not an idea anymore. Cash, checks, and finally, cards are going by the wayside. Still, most researchers estimate that mobile payments won’t catch fire for at least a few more years. Huh? The past dictates that it’s customer behavior and not research, which serves as the best indicator of technology adoption.

In this case, customers are running toward every chance they get to use their mobile devices for payment. PayPal, for example, is projecting that it will process $7 billion in mobile payments in 2012, almost double the $4 billion mark recorded in 2011. Tap-based payments facilitated by Near Field Communications (NFC) chips that are being built into mobile devices are the next phase. (Think tapping movie posters for tickets, your home speaker system for music, etc.) Square, a forerunner of such payments (using a card reader) is being used by US Presidential candidates for campaign contributions. And there are plenty of other examples of successful experiments from retailers. All of this speaks volumes about when customers will adopt full-on mobile payment technologies. It also says a lot about the lag that exists between those who currently offer mobile payment capabilities and those who don’t.

As Brett King writes on a recent Finextra blog post ‘Forget the NFC argument – look at payments behavior’: “If Visa and Mastercard don’t convert their networks to phone-capable in the next 24 months, I fear Square, PayPal, iTunes and a myriad of others are just waiting in the wings to circumvent their rails. Argue all you like about NFC adoption, that’s not what you should be watching. The tipping point is the behavioral shift on the mobile phone – that is what will kill plastic, and it has already happened.”

The moral of the story then for banks: Stop waiting around for someone to tell you when mobile payments are going to happen. Evidently, they are happening now.

via Running Toward Mobile Payments | Backbase Blog.

Mobile Sites vs. Apps: The Coming Strategy Shift

Summary:
Mobile apps currently have better usability than mobile sites, but forthcoming changes will eventually make a mobile site the superior strategy.

The most important question in a company’s mobile strategy is whether to do anything specialfor mobile in the first place. Some companies will never get substantial mobile use and should stick to making their desktop sites less insufferable on small screens.

But if your site happens to have decent appeal to mobile users, then the second strategy question is: Should you produce a mobile website or develop special mobile apps? The answer to this question today is quite different from what it will likely be in the future.

Current Mobile Strategy: Apps Best

As of this writing, there’s no contest: ship mobile apps if you can afford it. Our usability studies with mobile devices clearly show that users perform better with apps than with mobile sites. (Mobile sites have higher measured usability than desktop sites when used on a phone, but mobile apps score even higher.)

The empirical data is really all you need to know. It’s a fact that apps beat mobile sites in testing. To plan a mobile strategy, you don’t need to know why the winner is best, but I’ll try to explain it anyway.

Mobile applications are more usable than mobile-optimized websites because only limited optimization is possible during website design. An app can target the specific limitations and abilities of each individual device much better than a website can while running inside a browser.

Native application superiority holds for any platform, including desktop computers. However, desktop computers are so powerful that web-based applications suffice for many tasks.

In contrast, mobile devices provide an impoverished user experience: tiny screens, slow connectivity, higher interaction cost (especially when typing, but also due to users’ inability to double-click or hover), and less precision in pointing due to the fat-finger problem. The weaker the device, the more important it is to optimize for its characteristics.

Apps can also provide a superior business case for content providers because the various app stores offer a pseudo-micropayment ability that lets you collect money from users, which is harder to achieve over the public Internet.

Finally, let’s consider the differences between Nielsen’s Law for Internet bandwidth and Moore’s Law for computer power. Over the next decade, Internet bandwidth will likely become 57 times faster, while computers will become 100 times more powerful. (Future computers will be monsters compared to the puny hardware we’re using now.)

In other words, the relative advantage of running native code instead of downloading stuff over the Internet will be twice as big in 10 years. One more point in favor of mobile apps.

Future Mobile Strategy: Sites Best

In the future, the cost-benefit tradeoff for apps vs. mobile sites will change.

Although I just said that computers will become 100 times more powerful, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the iPhone 14 will be 100 times faster than the iPhone 4S. It’s more likely that hardware advances will be split between speed and other mobile priorities, especially battery lifetime. So, a future phone might be only 10 times faster (but will be thinner, lighter, and able to run much longer between charges), whereas download times will be cut by a factor 57.

The expense of mobile apps will increase because there will be more platforms to develop for. At a minimum, you’ll have to support Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. Furthermore, many of these platforms will likely fork into multiple subplatforms that require different apps for a decent user experience.

For user experience purposes, iOS has already forked into iPad vs. iPhone. Although they officially have the same OS software, the two devices need two very different user interface (UI) designs. (See our free report on iPad usability for tablet usability considerations.)

Amazon.com’s recent introduction of the Kindle Fire effectively forked the Android user experience with a fairly different platform. And, as our Kindle Fire usability study concluded, you need a separate app with a separate UI to deliver decent usability on this nonstandard device that’s selling like hotcakes.

It’s only realistic to expect even further UI diversity in the future. This will make it extremely expensive to ship mobile apps.

In contrast, mobile sites will retain some cross-platform capabilities, so you won’t need as many different designs. High-end sites will need 3 mobile designs to target phones, mid-sized tablets (like Kindle Fire), and big tablets. Using ideas like responsive design will let you adapt each of these site versions to a range of screen sizes and capabilities. The same basic UI design will work for both a 6.8-inch tablet and a 7.5-inch tablet if you simply shrink or stretch things a bit. (A 5-inch phone would require a different design, with fewer features andabbreviated content.)

Most important, new web technologies such as HTML 5 will substantially improve mobile site capabilities. We’re already seeing mobile sites from publishers such as the Financial Times andPlayboy with UIs that are very similar to applications offered by equivalent newspapers and magazines.

Today, FT and Playboy use sites instead of apps for business reasons, not UI reasons. Publishers are tired of having a huge share of subscription revenues confiscated by app store owners, and Playboy wants to publish more titillating content than Apple’s prudish censors allow.

Freedom from censorship and freedom to keep your own money are good reasons to stay with the free Internet instead of the walled garden of proprietary app stores. In the future, better UIs and more adaptive implementations will be additional reasons to go with mobile apps.

A last benefit of a mobile-site strategy is better integration with the full web. It’s much easier for others to link to a site than to integrate with a 3^rd-party application. In the long run, theInternet will defeat smaller, closed environments.

(Apps may remain better for tasks that are intensely feature-rich applications, such as photo editing — whereas mobile sites will be better for design problems like e-commerce/m-commerce, corporate websites, news, medical info, social networking, etc. that are rich in content but don’t require intense data manipulation.)

When Will the Strategy Shift Happen?

Now for the $64,000 question — or, more accurately for most companies, the million-dollar question: When will the recommended strategy change? In other words, when will the changeover in favor of mobile sites be strong enough for you to abandon mobile apps?

Sadly, I don’t know. Usability insights can tell us what’s best for users under various circumstances, but they can’t predict how fast these circumstances will change in the real world. In my experience, things change much more slowly than one might expect.

For example, in September 2000, I said that mobile usability required a device with a deck-of-cards form factor that would “get rid of the keys and spend every available square millimeter on pixels.” A few months later, I predicted that European vendors’ infatuation with non-web mobile phones would lead to the demise of that continent’s lead in mobile technology.

Both predictions came true, but not until 7 years later when the iPhone was finally launched as (a) a device with almost the entire surface used for data, and (b) a product from a computer company rather than a phone company.

Even worse, in 2001, I thought that “Mobile Devices Will Soon Be Useful.” Sure, if by “soon” you mean 6 years 😦

Good mobile design was so close I could taste it. I knew what was needed, and I didn’t think it was so hard to do. But, as the famous saying goes, don’t confuse a clear view with a short distance. As I admitted in my retrospective on my first 10 years writing the Alertbox, when I was wrong about the timing it “was often because I was too enthusiastic about a new technology’s potential. When I was right, it was often because I was conservative.”

To conclude: I do believe mobile sites will win over mobile apps in the long term. But when that will happen is less certain. Today, if you are serious about creating the best possible mobile user experience, my advice is to develop apps.

Learn More

293-page report on Usability of Mobile Websites and Applications with 210 design guidelines and 479 screenshots is available for download.