One of the benefits of watching the technology world since I was a kid is I’ve gotten to see a few cycles play themselves out over time.  I was reminded of that while reading this post entitled “Bye Bye Web, Hello Apps” in which the author says…

The web is dead. OK, it isn’t but it might be dying a slow painful death when it comes to how users access online tools and the platforms they use to carry out certain tasks.

This is a consequence of the media saturated world that we live in, a world where on demand is taking charge as audiences control what they watch, when they watch it and how they watch it.

…

There are huge advantages to iPhone, iPod Touch’s and the mobile web but it does mean that designers and developers now have new parameters in which to be creative, a world where attention to detail prevails, or at least it should. Will it be that the traditional web will be secondary to mobile/iPhone/iPad sites?”

Again, this is a cycle.  The truth is any web site that has an app SHOULD be able to make a web app that can do the same things.

The only reason they can’t is because of artificial inhibitors that are placed on them by hardware vendors.  Namely Apple who, realizing they can make more money on apps, has chosen to limit what developers can access via a web interface.  Even going so far as to hide their own internal (and very high quality) web app framework.

This is natural behavior and has happened before in the past (think Microsoft resisting the web on the desktop until it couldn’t anymore).  Whenever a vendor has control of the dominant platform that vendor will try to keep open platforms down.  Then competitors jump in and try to do business like the dominant player in the hopes that they will become the dominant player.  The end result is a world that looks like it's becoming a place for closed environments. 

But what inevitably happens is the competitors realize they can’t become the dominant player and they instead start backing open solutions in order to dethrone the dominant player (even if a competitor becomes the dominant player that will lead the previous dominant player to embrace open solutions to keep themselves from being driven out of business)

That’s what will happen here.  Right now we’re in the time of the app.  Apple is the dominant player and Google, Microsoft, RIM and Palm are all trying to create their own App stores to compete.  But they won’t win and eventually they’ll start to push open standards for Web apps.  In fact, in many ways they already have. Google’s already inclined that way, Microsoft has based their Smartphone on a web technology (Silverlight) and Palm’s “platform” uses web technology like Javascript and CSS.

So the bottom line is don’t mistake a fad for an overall trend.  One last point I wanted to address from the linked to post…

More and more of our tasks are now being offered in an alternative way. We can bank through the mobile web and we can use it to blog too. This is naturally going to force designers and developers into thinking of their products in new ways.

Not all sites can be carbon copied for the mobile web, they have to be re-imagined. However rather than see this as a hassle let’s see it is a chance for designers to embrace this constraint in a very positive way. It’s an opportunity for designers to distill their apps down to the very basics and focus on only the most essential features.

This is the wrong way of thinking.  Developers should certainly kick out a quick mobile experience for the Smartphone and try to use the basic UI framework laid down by the phone itself.  But developers shouldn’t get into the mindset of Desktop/Smartphone.

As we can already see from the tablets, set top boxes and other various form factors coming out the computing experience is moving beyond the desktop and it’s not stopping at the Smartphone.  Developers need to start thinking in terms of variable screen size and start building interfaces that can scale but are recognizable at any size. 

That’s difficult (I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t completely wrapped my head around the concept yet).  But it’s the way of the future and if you're going to change your mindset (not a simple task) you should reach for that and not just a smartphone mentality.