The mobile web is broken. The modern approach to mobile web development is dead wrong, and flies against everything we've learned over the last 15 years.
I follow developments related to Google's Android OS pretty closely and I recently saw that The New York Times released an app for Android. The iPhone has had a New York Times app for a long time now. Android fans rejoiced, but I winced because I've seen this before—circa 1997.
Remember the heyday of Internet Explorer versus Netscape Navigator? Remember that both browsers were so incompatible with each other that two websites would have to be created for each browser? "Click here for MSIE, Click here for Netscape Navigator," or if someone was lazy they would just write "This site is optimized for..." whatever.
This was bad. We were glad these days were over. We finally really got that mess cleaned up, and with the release of IE 8.0 it appeared incompatibility problems were soon to be behind us.
And then the mobile web exploded.
Suddenly, if you didn't have a version of your website in Apple's App Store or in Google's Market then you were behind the times. Engadget, BBC, Dictionary.com, NPR, USA Today, Yelp, etc all jumped on board. Colleagues asked if we were going to create our own iPhone app. Seriously? Are we so obsessed with following the latest trends that we forgot how to create a good website? Rather than creating an app that works on only one platform (i.e. Apple, Google, RIM, Palm, etc.), why not create a good mobile site that uses web standards? After all HTML works on all of those devices. Why are we forcing ourselves to reinvent the web standards wheel for mobile? We've learned nothing!
Well, there's a reason these folks want to create an app for accessing their content—because their site sucks on the iPhone or on the Droid or on mobile devices in general. Usually their site sucks because of some or all of these reasons.
- Site contains an overwhelming amount of content/navigation that does not display well on a small screen.
- Site loads slow because of huge JavaScript APIs that perform unnecessary navigation animations, lots of big graphics, or lots of JavaScript and CSS. In other words, site is not optimized for desktops, much less mobile devices.
- Site contains pointless Adobe Flash animations, or flash based navigation, which can easily be done with web standards.
- Site relies on the onmouseover type of JavaScript events for navigation, which are awkward/hard to simulate on a touch screen.
Why not design a site that avoids these pitfalls? One that works on the desktop and on the mobile device? After all, compatibility problems were solved when we standardized HTML. An iPhone app, or an Android app, or any platform-specific app is not standard in any way, shape, or form. Let's take a step back and look and what even the big guys do wrong.
We want our desktop websites to be so needlessly fancy that we have to create a completely separate mobile website. Usually
www.company.com would create a
m.company.com mobile website.) Unfortunately almost all of these mobile websites suck. They lack the functionality of the normal site, they are hard to use, hard to navigate, and ugly as sin. A few examples are
m.facebook.com,
m.allrecipes.com, and
m.netflix.com. These sites were designed with speed and simplicity in mind, but their usability still sucks when compared to the real sites. How many times have you been on a mobile site desperately search for that "Full Site" link?
Fortunately for us browsers on the iPhone OS and Android use a fully standards compliant web browser and faster 3G networks are now ubiquitous. So we have to ask ourselves, why the hell are we still trying to build tiny, crippled versions of the real website? Why not just build a real website that is efficient and lends itself well to small screens as well as big screens? This is the path that I decided to take.
Why waste our time building mobile apps that are platform specific and only reach a small portion of the populous? Even Apple on it's best day only has about 15% of the worldwide mobile marketshare. Why kill ourselves making crappy, crippled mobile sites? It doesn't make sense, but that is the status quo so many blindly follow. No, let's build one website, that focuses on web standards, with simple navigation that doesn't overwhelm mobile users, and compress and optimize the site by cutting out fluff that slows mobile devices to a crawl. Infinite birds, one stone.
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