Will smartphones continue to ship with web browsers?
This guest article was submitted by Calob Horton.
Over the weekend, Apple passed the 10 billion download mark for its App Store. And recent statistics show that Android users download more apps per month on average than iPhone users.
Games make up the majority of apps in any app store, but there are also many that can almost completely replace the pages of popular websites. Amazon, eBay, and FaceBook apps may be the first examples that come to mind, but there are also various news sites and blogs with their own apps too. With more and more of these apps being released, are we far from the day when a web browser on our smartphones is redundant?
There's an incredible amount of apps across these platforms' app stores that are simply "remakes" of a popular website. Engadget, TUAW, Android Central, SlashGear, NY Times, Phandroid, and many other sites have their articles presented in a format that's easier for readers to consume on the go. Users just tap on an icon and the material instantly loads up, eliminating the need to open up the web browser, type in an address, and press "Go." The apps also scale to whichever screen size the reader is using, so there's no double-tapping or pinch-to-zooming needed.
Not only are they scaled down to fit whatever screen size you're reading from, but they also exclude Flash. Flash is a known battery killer, so being able to avoid it is extremely important for mobile media. We all know the major push for HTML5 mobile devices, and most of these kinds of apps are built with HTML5 or some other open standard.
Granted, not all websites have mobile apps set up yet. In fact, we're probably looking at a few years before the majority of websites do. But if we take into consideration how efficient and popular apps are, it may not be too far-fetched to think that we could possibly have a browser-less device in our hands one day.
What do you think?
This guest article was submitted by Calob Horton.
