A world without the browser

Where is the world going? To mobile. [...] All with your fingers. All with little apps. All with no mouse. All with an App Store where you can find everything you need. The world is all going to mobile. We will spend more time without the mouse than with it.

This is the Internet era all over again. Back then, we had hundreds of small companies that started with the goal to build web sites. Now, every company wants an iPhone app. You can deliver more value with an app, than you can with a web site. More interactive, more personal, 24/7, in the hands of your customer, with push capabilities.

The result is that every company will have a mobile app, and hundreds of small companies will be created to support it. That you will "navigate" between companies moving from an app to another. That the search engine will not be on a browser, but in the app store (or in the search engine of the app stores, which someone should start developing fast...).

This is going to change the world as we know it. If the browser loses its centrality, ads will go somewhere else. The search engine will be way different. Someone has to invent a platform to link apps one to the other, of course, but the infrastructure is there. It is the engine of the browser itself, with its HTML, AJAX, CSS.

The browser will be swallowed inside the apps. We will have a world without the browser. The future is all of a sudden clear to me. Well, the browser fight looks kind of moot now...

 via Fabrizio Capobianco on Mobile Open Source (@fabricapo on Twitter)

Why I blog this: 

Fabrizio presents a very interesting vision of one possible future. A mobile future. While I disagree that there will be just a few use cases where it's more efficient to sit down at a desk and use keyboard and mouse, I do agree on his main argument: applications will cover many of the aspects that we are currently using search and websites for.

What I believe is crucial to determine whether a mobile application or the mobile web will be used is this: routine or frequency.

Let me explain: looking up the weather for the region you're living in - or for your current whereabouts -  is done most efficiently on an application because you look for this information with a certain frequency (once a day, before you go out on a run, ...). Whenever it's a one-off search (I'm looking for the weather in Oman, because I'm at the airport checking out last-minute deals) you'd probably be better off doing a search on the mobile web for 'weather Oman'... and not download an app for the weather there.

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Related posts (chosen for you manually):

- App Stores vs. the Mobile Web
- App Stores are not the future, says Google

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Image credits go to Miss Rogue on Flickr