The debate on whether to build mobile web apps or native apps is as old as the technology itself. A good analogy for the battle between Native and Web apps is Desktop vs. Cloud applications. It seems the distant past, but until around 2004 the vast majority of applications ran on your desktop. You had to buy software in the store (or online), install and use. As bandwidth increased, and GUI standards improved, more and more applications moved to the cloud.
The ArgumentsBetter access to device resources, the ability to store user settings (and payment information), offline access and a better UX flow are among the most cited arguments for Native Apps. Instant access without the need to download 100MB’s, being platform agnostic and the ability to push new content without app updates are the best arguments for Web Applications.
But there are other trends, both related and unrelated to Augmented Reality, which makes us believe that Web Apps is the future of Augmented Reality applications.
Hardships Of User AcquisitionIn the past 3 years, it has become increasingly hard to get people to installand keep apps on their phones:
There are good reasons to believe that web apps will begin to look more and more like native apps due to these technology trends:
Today, we are only dipping our toes in Augmented Reality. We believe that in the next 5–10 years, a fully (or semi) transparent device that will be worn as glasses, will replace the mobile device as our personal computer.
The most important difference between smartphones and smart glasses is the promise of access to contextual information. Today, we only see glimpses of value on our smartphones (mainly with location based information, e.g your iPhone now knows when you are parking your car and saves the location), but in the future, we will see our exercise data on the road while we jog, log food information when we look at it (or a menu), instantly translate a language we don’t speak, see information on people we meet and much much more.
It is impossible to foresee all of the services and applications we could use along our daily lives, especially when we go outside our daily routine (e.g travel). We need to have the ability to access contextual data instantly, without the need to install an app for that. Sure, there will still be applications that we will take a significant portion of our usage time, but the power of contextual data “on the go” has immense potential.
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