There’s been a fair amount of coverage over the last week looking at the mobile web/mobile app divide. Matt Gemmell provides four different classifications of mobile apps running from web apps (explicitly running in a general-purpose browser) through to fully native classifications (without an HTML/CSS user interface). He goes on to look at the pros and cons of the different options.
What really kicked things off though was Flurry’s release of statistics which point to mobile apps taking a greater share of the time Americans spend on their mobile phones.
Microsoft has released an infographic which give you an idea of the mobile browser and app split as well as giving an indication of which of the major Western countries are heavier users of their smartphones.
Chris Dixon has used Flurry’s figures to raise concerns about the trend as signalling a move away from a more open web, with Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store acting as potential gatekeepers.
Steve Schlafman looks at the ‘Uberification of the US service economy’ as startups deliver app based business models that bring together discovery, order, payment, fulfillment and confirmation in a closed loop.
Benedict Evans looks at the rapidly evolving mobile environment, pointing to the issues of discovery and identity as areas that we are still looking for solutions to evolve and/or mature.
A less mobile centric picture of the online landscape in the UK is provided by the following infographic, again from Microsoft.
Both Forrester and We Are Social are giving a plug for the sometimes neglected Google+ as part of brand’s social strategy. Engagement levels are good, even if the user population is dwarfed by that of Facebook.
Mobile will drive growth in media usage worldwide, with television and PC based internet access showing respectable increases, with print advertising being the major loser according to ZenithOptimedia’s forecast for global media quoted in Econsultancy.
The release of the Amazon Dash is a great example of Amazon’s continuing quest to reduce consumers’ barriers to purchase.
The world is seeing increases in inequality in income and wealth with Occupy Wall Street’s drawing attention to the top 1%. Priceonomics looks more closely at the figures and finds that it’s the top .01% that are really taking the cake.
The featured image is by eko
