The End of WAP
I was sitting in the Mobile Mondays NY meeting last week, listening to the SEO advice from the very level-headed guy at Google, and realized that everyone on stage was preaching what we have been trying to educate people on for years in the industry: WAP is different from the Web. It’s really different. You can’t just point people at your .com site and expect their phones not to crash, you need to accommodate users in ways you never have before. At its easiest, this just means directing them to a watered down site with a few pages of text, but if you’re really serious about it, this means building a fully adaptive site that scales its images, custom-tailors its stylesheets (or lack of), and even completely changes the markup from WML to XHTML-MP to CHTML.
That’s what we’ve been preaching for years, and it’s finally about to become irrelevant.
About a million iPhones are out there around now, and growing fast. Maybe even more Nokia N95s or other extra-smart gadgets are out there. Some of the new phones can’t even read WML, but they all execute Javascript like nobody’s business. They’re normal browsers.. nearly. Over the last week, potentially thousands of users stopped going to the mobile-specific sites and started going directly to their usual desktop web sites. Even more people browsed the web for the first time ever on their phones.
What does this mean for the mobile web as we know it so far? Is it so niche that it’s not even worth looking at, because it’ll be so overtaken by users with smart devices that it will become invisible on the radar?
Probably. The mobile web will never be as complicated as it is today. It’s a patchwork of support, where when you evaluate the characteristics of one device, you add support to about 0.8% of your customers. The mobile web sites have been outsourced to development companies that build a mobile-friendly version of the site, usually completely decoupled from the real site, with its own revenue streams. Soon, all you’ll need is a separate stylesheet, if that.
It’s hard to say it, but we knew the day would come: WAP as we know it has peaked and the days of a totally different mobile site will be on their way to the dustbin.
This doesn’t mean that mobile web development will die, it will just become far simpler. I still don’t believe that a page designed for a 19″ display will ever be desirable on a 3″ display, but that’s easier to fix: Most of the changes will be doable with the same content, with a separate stylesheet (incidentally, why doesn’t the iPhone respond to the ‘handheld’ CSS media type so that you don’t have to do any detection at all?). In the meantime, though, those of us who fought for years to explain the dire difference between the two worlds need to adjust our tunes.
September 4th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
Sorry, but aren’t we possible mislead by Apple marketing hype and internet technocratic lobbyists who claim to know to hold the truth of what the internet is and is not (where we should all know: Everything and its complete opposite exists on the internet – with us actually being hard pressed in most cases, if we were forced to decide which of the two has a greater right of existence.)
We are not at the brink of the unified desktop/mobile experience, we could as well be at the beginning of the discovery that the mobile targeted experience is the upcoming dominating consumer and personal use of the internet experience, where over time internet sites will make very sure to totally embrace NOT foremost the desktop experience, but the experience of what the user wants to do while on the move and while using a handset/handheld device.
Technically there is of course absolutely no reason to design sites in HTML where you can use XHTML and address both - the desktop and the handheld experience in a good way.
However, that is not really the issue. The issue is that technology advances also foster a broader opportunity for supporting different use cases of what you want to do with the internet, per the functions made available to you through the technical properties and embedded functions the devices offers.
Instead of (ignorantly) ignoring the best features that WML had (for example having reliable, standardized service invocation option for the embedded voice and messaging functions of the device) - the browser developers should actively embrace to REATIN the good portions of functionality that makes the mobile experience a BETTER fit to being mobile than “the only desktop in mind” experience could ever deliver. Innovation has also to do with accepting and embracing those ideas of other folks when they were good instead of just flat out declare everything as outdated and useless for no good reason…
Even if Opera and iPhone suggest that force feeding the desktop experience to the mobile community, there is a rich opportunity to not “randomly serve” mobile users with a “guesswork results created by proxies/smart browsers”.
The mobile customer community - once the found that mediocre site adaptation results doesn’t “offer any kick” when being used on their mobile, they will compare this with sites, that offer an experience well BEYOND just targeting a desktop device. Such offerings will embrace the SPECIALTIES available ONLY in devices that are designed for being carried around. And of course developers glued to the concept that desktop will always be the dominant experience will remain totally ignorant of ever supporting GPS, device accelerometers, embedded APIs for voice and messaging service invocation, standardized presence status updating etc. as they have been in the past.
In many (so called developing) global markets the mobile has a much stringer role for day to day life of using the internet and creating well targeted use cases.
Once mobile Internet use overtakes the one of the installed desktop user base and the learning curve of what the site COULD be doing if it wasn’t reduced to a meagre “desktop legacy site” people will do exactly the opposite: Create sites at foremost towards their mobile user base - and only in second priority care for if the site has a “full blown desktop experience” - except where such experience also makes sense.
There is a good reason to assume that this innovation and push will not come from countries where desktop PCs were the first wave of Internet capable devices off course - but the second wave of internet capable devices is the mobile wave, and those who are not blindfolded be their trust into “this is what we know, and therefore it must be the way that is the only true way” will see that markets like South Africa, China and India are embracing mobile much more readily, more pragmatically and completely - as in many cases this will be the first household internet device people have.
Of course we can decide to sit here and wit for them to come up with the stuff that puts us in the legacy bin - or be a bit more awake and less self content that the desktop experience was sustainable as the dominant concept of internet use - because it isn’t - both will be there and both are needed in their very own right.
Or not?
September 4th, 2007 at 4:48 pm
You bring up a lot of interesting points. Right, you certainly can’t forget about the mobile use case and just go desktop for everything. If anything, it’s more important today than it was yesterday, and that vector won’t change any time soon.
In practice, the thing that “going mobile” means now, is hiring some consultant to take care of that mobile thing and write a totally separate and disconnected site that is optimized in mobile. Crisp Wireless, iLoop mobile, Starcut, are all in the business because this is what people are asking for. It’s not integrated into most back-end systems thoroughly, often hosted in a totally different place, and it’s basically the bastard stepchild of the desktop site — often just enough to cover their bases (something like back to the day everyone suddenly “needed” a web site).
Hopefully, with markup and capabilities starting to converge, that should make tight integration a much more realistic possibility. Again, that’s not to say that you won’t want a different feature set based on the user’s access method or you won’t want to differentiate between the two — just that designers and developers can use standard web development tools with an eye toward mobile.
Of course, the exact opposite thing could happen: People browse the web more on their phones but each phone has a totally new variant of browser that you’ll have to appeal to in order to get that 1.5% of the market.. and we’ll be back where we are now, only with even more volume.
September 4th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Ah - off course: Before we simply “give in” - how about support those folks that promote device adaptation standards - who have started to enter the next step of turning a global mobile device properties database into a reality. Have a look at the Device Description Working Group at W3C Mobile Web Initiative. As ISP or Operator or Content comapny cannot drive this alone, an announcement of a consortium of not so unimportant players (the fourteen industry giants who jonintly run dotMobi) have invested heavily in supporting that very direction - not only by money, but also by hiring the right people (see http://dev.mobi/node/504). Folks like these are working hard to make device adaptation a reality - not only for themselves, but also affordable and accessible for developers like “you and me”.
Which is quite logical - as in teh bigger picture they’ll all benefit from a broader, richer understanding of the usage of the internet outside of the limiting focus of desktop targeted use cases.
They (the folks behind dotMobi) can be assumed to be among the first to be prepared to embrace and benefit from supporting a capability of broad variation and finer granularity of user segment targeting on the internet - leaving less on the table to those, who cannot deliver to all targets, if the others ignore the breadth…
Mobile is an (in the US widely underestimated and underdeveloped) unique channel to consumers. Luckily we are only at the beginning so there is a big cake of which many folks can eat their share… if they don’t ignore it.
Actually more and more folks do embrace this by understanding mobile as a marketing channel in its own right. They even target TV campaigns to promote the mobile channel, because that’s where the can reach the target customer segment they want to reach - check out Disney’s new movie site at http://hsm2.mobi
But mobile is nevertheless not “Big boys with deep pockets” only any more: Once there is an easily accessible and usable way to mobilize “the fat tail” of community / user created sites.
Users will target the experience the need and desire most: The one they carry with them - as it is the one that matters most to them, allows them to express themselves in the most direct ways and is what their direct social peers use as well. Social Networking and User created content is in the long run simply not going to push the desktop experience, but mobile. No matter if we like it or not.
September 4th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Sure. In the mean time, we have WURFL and the various libraries that go along with it.. but how much good can they do for the masses? Writing a mobile site this way will never be as simple as opening up a text editor and writing HTML.. And if it is, it’s because it is passing through an adaptation layer that hurts your control over the final look and feel.
If you’re Mom’s Bakery and you want to control your mobile experience, you still need an engineering team, or a very thick solution. Not necessarily true for desktop. If you can reach most of your market by catering to handhelds like the iPhone and the newer Nokias, you’re going to have a far better time. But that’s a big ‘if’ right now.. hopefully not for long.
I don’t think that heavily relying on device adaptation is the best long-term initiative for the end-user. Since dotmobi is a conglomerate of industry giants, shouldn’t they get their heads together and decide on the client-end solution rather than an adaptation layer that all providers will need to use? It doesn’t have to be complex or even feature-rich; XHTML-MP is a fine start. You could do a lot more with HTML as well if it was designed to engage the full capabilities of the desktop, but even with the limited reach, it’s of course gone far beyond the hopes of its creators.
Either way, there is a huge amount of opportunity in the mean time. People still don’t know exactly what works and what doesn’t in the industry, and that’s the really exciting part.
September 5th, 2007 at 2:21 am
I agree with you that the future starts right here
You put an important question forward. I understand you however to also say: Yes, SOME adaptation in on or the other is needed to REALLY achieve a good result on avarage for our customer) approach. If so, the question is nor why the place where applying adaptation matters, for whom it has a anegative impact and if that situation will remain like that for the impacted party, or the problem will magrite elsewhere over time?
A client based solution, a proxy based solution and a site based solution all have positie and negative aspects for some people on the content creation value chain - and if you really look at it all the giants are not relying on working the issue in just one single end, as the have to serve their customers independant fom the question which apporach will “win” in the long run.
Probably it would be quite interesting to make a table and figure out benefits and challenges for the three situations of contant adaptation: client based (”Smart browsing Clients”), 3rd party proxy (Usable Net and the likes), site based (7val, volantis, and with some reservation WURFL..) and look at the plusses and minusses for the different parties involved (Consumer, Mobile Network Operator, Browser Vendor, Adaptation Technology Vendor, Handset Vendor, Site Owner, Hosting Provider).
Still - if what dotMobi does as it seems to go, Mom’s bakery doesn’t have to be the engineer; the topic is to acahive making the content and experince fit for the intended purpose - nothing more nothing less. For Mom it would be sufficient that her ISP Garage Hosting Ltd. runs their hosting with a device aware webssite tool that is as easy to use as blogging - or for her ISP to partner with a net based proxy vendor that assures when people see her site, their device is not forced to load 600k to throw out 585k of if becasue that portion is too much for the device to display - for either having no CPU power, or no memory, or not all the right plugins etc. etc. . We see innovation happing in mobile devices and networks, desktop devices and networks and data center devices and networks. The gap and differentiation is NOT becasue we waht these devices to be all the same, but becaue theri main use cases, the physical properites and the context of use is different enough to justify pick different approaches to do things in all three cases.
The opportunity for Mom (aka: “the masses”) to become a voice on the Web and jointly creating “the fat tail” was in the first place not primarily a function of which markup to use - IMHO it was a result of enabling browser based content creation and publishing. Lets turn contant adaptation in a widely APPLICABLE (instead of just available) standards, and we find theres a very good chance for be be embraced.
Of course it would help if popular sites like myspace, facebook, youtube and so on would assure that they embrace site based device adaptation - one good reason for them could be to want to remain in as much control of how their branded output looks as possible. (however, i guess that could be done much better than at facebook, who recently did an special iPhone only optimized site… nice marketing - but why not at least assure that it WORKS with any reasonable mobile browser… )
September 5th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
The thing I’m honestly holding out for is a simplification/reduction of the mobile browser market. You can customize the server side until you’re blue in the face and actually get some reasonable results, but what you end up with is complex and (IMHO) inelegant, no matter if you write it yourself or if you can use a dotmobi adaptaion layer, or something else. But today, that’s our best option.
However: The two hottest high-end phones on the market today are the iPhone and the Nokia N95. Both run the Safari browser, and together, I suspect that they’re the sort of new mobile user that we’ll start seeing overtake the others in the mobile market. Everyone with their other phones may use the mobile web.. maybe (few actually do), but basically everyone with an iPhone does indeed browse the web. So that’s an estimated 4.5+ million new mobile web users estimated this year from Apple alone, and all on the same browser with the same capabilities.
So at that point it’s just a numbers game. Mom’s going look at this and make an iPhone / N95 stylesheet for her page (or redirect if she’s getting fancy), and call it a day.. because that will soon cover the majority case. The biggest, hard-core sites will still need to adapt, but that will be a continually diminishing return.