Social 'Will Drive Users Back to Browsers'

Malhotra: "Focus on making great content and don't worry about distribution channels"The distinction between apps and mobile web is "academic", according to mobile payments company Bango. 

The comments, from Anil Malhotra, Bango's SVP marketing, come in response to a blogging spat that has ignited the debate. A blog from apps analytics company Flurry claimed that apps have surpassed mobile web in terms of minutes of usage by Americans. 

A frosty blog from mobile browser company (and Flurry client) SkyFire was posted in direct response, saying that Flurry's stats were not comparing like-for-like - Flurry had compared data for all Americans versus its own figures for smartphone users. 

Perhaps a case of two companies defending (and in Flurry's case, promoting) their own corner, but Bango's Anil Malhotra says that its own analysis found that it's very difficult to measure how much time people are spending on the mobile web versus apps, and which consumers prefer. "I think the distinction is largely academic," he says. "It matters if you're Apple because they want people to be contained within the Apple platform. There's no point, if you're Apple, in promoting a business model that uses the web, because you then can't control it."

In general terms, Malhotra says that apps allow platform providers to lock consumers into a ecosystem. "For publishers and developers of content or services at the other end of the food chain, web services make a lot of logical sense, because they're easy to create and easy to deploy. We think that over a period of time people are going to start using browsers a lot more to get to app content.

"What this is all about ultimately is the question of 'what's the best way for content developers and brands to interact with customers who've got mobile phones," he says. 

Malhotra says the debate is, to a certain extent, missing the point. "One of the reasons people more frequently go to the mobile web is Tweets," he says. "Social media is a powerful tool at the moment. In some respects not much has changed - 20 years ago people were using Compuserve to talk to each other and share what was on the internet. That was a social medium. Now it's been refined into a real business." 

He says the message to mobile marketers is to make sure you have a social presence and you have content that people can share, and that consumer can easily access it when they receive it from a friend, without having to download an app. 

"The simplicity of using the web model means will marketers will move back to the web, because web browsers will get better and better on mobile phones, and HTML5 creates much more sophisticated user experiences than web browsers have done."

"The beauty of the web was and always will be that you create the content once and everybody can use it. Focus on making great content and don't worry about distribution channels because the web takes care of it."