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Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices
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Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices How marketers can navigate the increasingly murky waters of mobile platforms, devices and services
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About this whitepaper
The results and advice in Strategic guide for bringing content to mo-bile devices are based on research con-ducted prior to creating the product road-map for mobile content delivery at Zmags.
The content is protected by copyright and cannot be duplicated without permission from Zmags Inc, 320 Congress Street, Bos-ton MA 02210, USA.
The author or any other advisors distribut-ing this guide can under no circumstances be held responsible for any damage or business impact from taking advice from this whitepaper.
To contact the author directly, please email Theis Sondergaard, Senior Product Manager at [email protected]
Published June 2010 – all rights reserved.
Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices Contents
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Executive Summary 4
The New Shape of Online Content Delivery 5
Repurpose Your Content – Rethink Your Concept 7
The Lay of the Land 8
Data Matters, Not Devices 10
Build it and They Will Come? 12
Complexity 13
Apps vs. Browsers 14
Tablets – the Expansion of Mobile 17
The Future of Flash and HTML5 18
Flash is Everywhere - Except Mobile 18
Adobe is Moving On 19
What is HTML5? 20
HTML5 and Mobile Users 22
HTML5 is Not a Full-Fledged Alternative to Flash 22
Conclusion 23
References 24
About Zmags 24
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Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devicesExecutive Summary
Executive Summary
This whitepaper will give you an overview of the rapidly changing mobile arena, and provide insights and inspiration regarding how to address the growing mobile mar-ket.
Key points:
The mobile arena is messy and com-plex, and it’s not getting better any time soon. It will increase in complexity and continue to change rapidly
There’s no magic solution – it will take effort to bring your content to a mo-bile audience if you want the full effect of reaching your audience on the move
Don’t get bogged down in technol-ogy – focus first and foremost on your content and your product offerings
Repurpose, re-think. Respect the size of the screen, the nature of the device and the mindset of your audience
Focus on iPhone and Android for now – create a Webkit optimized experi-ence without using Flash
Make sure your normal website has a workable mobile version without Flash – this is the entry point for most of your mobile audience
Flash is not dead – but on mobile devices you need to ignore it for now
HTML5 is the future of the web – but not quite the present. Use it for video playback on mobile devices
Cover the mobile browser first, then consider apps if your need for advanced interactivity is high
Zmags mobile solution – we walk the talk. It’s browser-based and optimized for Apple and Android devices
Happy reading!
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Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices The New Shape of Online Content Delivery
Remember the good ol’ days of 2003? De-livering online content was a simple choice of optimizing for either Internet Explorer 5 or 6. Combined, these two versions of Internet Explorer had a whopping market share of 95%. If someone asked for Safari compatibility, you would suppress a laugh and give a polite answer. And all data-traf-fic was going to desktop or laptop comput-ers. Mobile devices were used for calling other people while online content lived on the computer.
Sure, the web standards were dictated by Microsoft and the browser was slow and buggy – but the upside was that you could reach pretty much everyone online as long as you made sure your content looked great on a 17-inch monitor con-trolled by Windows, Internet Explorer and Flash in an 800x600 resolution.
Then came the avalanche. The inevitable backlash for Microsoft on the browser market, the rise of Google, the resurrection
The New Shape of Online Content Delivery
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of Apple, the introduction of smartphones, the iPhone revolution – we could go on. From a viewpoint of diversity, choice and innovation, the past seven years have been absolutely magnificent. From the view-point of someone just wanting to get his content online in the best possible way, it’s been horrendous.
The really bad news? It’s not going to get any easier any time soon. It will get even more complex. We’ll have lots of losers in this race for innovation. And we’ll have several winners, not just one.
Mobile data traffic is projected to grow 40x over the next five years, and you could write a book on all the new devices that have been released in the past year, and those that will be released in the near fu-ture. Consumers are going mobile, and ev-ery hardware and software company in the world is fighting for a piece of the action. By December 2009, mobile data-traffic was bigger than voice-traffic.
Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices The New Shape of Online Content Delivery
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First of all – forget technology. If you are serious about “going mobile”, the real key to success is to take both your audience and the medium seriously.
The mindset of a user on the move is dif-ferent from the guys sitting in front of a screen. Quick access to wanted informa-tion takes the top spot over interactivity and laid back entertainment. The nature of the device – a small screen, typically with touch capabilities – forms a natural frame around what content is useful and how you can present it.
Forget about taking your existing product mobile in replica. Figure out what part of your product, service or message is useful for the audience on the move and hone in on it.
Repurpose Your Content – Rethink Your Concept
Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices Repurpose Your Content – Rethink Your Concept
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For Zmags customers, it’s all about tak-ing publications to mobile devices, be it product catalogs, weekly flyers, brochures, monthly magazines and so on. It’s a start-ing point to take the existing publication as is online to mobile devices, and our mo-bile product supports this – but it’s only a starting point. If you really want to reach your audience, you must repurpose your content for the situation. It’s simple stuff, like cleaning up the pages and increasing the font size. But it means making difficult choices regarding what content and what services are even relevant to the mobile user.
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Navigating the mobile world is about knowing your devices, what operating systems and browsers they use, and what these combined elements provide in terms of opportunities and limitations.
A number of operating systems for smart-phones are currently fighting for market share:
The Lay of the Land
Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices The Lay of the Land
Source: NPD Group
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Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices The Lay of the Land
The graph on the opposite page is for the US market. It’s important to understand that there’s a huge difference between the US and world markets, especially Europe, when looking at these market share num-bers. Worldwide, the numbers look like this:
Suddenly, when looking at the world and not just the US, Symbian is the biggest player out there, not Blackberry, Android or iPhone.
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Source: Gartner
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If you look at the graphs on the previous pages, it’s tempting to conclude that Sym-bian and Blackberry devices should be the main target when publishing content for mobile devices, depending on whether or not you’re in the US. However, the picture looks dramatically different if you look at
Data Matters, Not Devices
Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices Data Matters, Not Devices
where the actual data traffic goes, and it actually simplifies the geographical chal-lenge for companies aiming at both US and European markets.
Smartphone OS market share, based on data-traffic:
Source: Admob (Now Google)
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Now it becomes clear that Android and iPhone OS are the big players in US and Europe. Combining these two puts you close to 86% market-share in Western Europe and 81% in the US. And, consider-ing the growth of the Android OS market-share shown in Figure 1, this choice makes even more sense:
Projecting these numbers is always dan-gerous. But from the current movements, Android is on the rise, iPhone is stable and the rest are fighting to get a solid grip in the market. WebOS may perform an inter-esting comeback after the HP acquisition, and Windows Mobile 7 has high ambi-tions as well.
Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices Data Matters, Not Devices
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This can quickly turn into a “chicken and the egg” discussion. Is data-use lacking on some devices because consumers don’t want it, or is it simply because the right services are not there?
There’s no doubt that there’s a self-enforc-ing mechanism going on right now—for ex-ample, this whitepaper is encouraging you to focus on specific platforms due to their current size. However, there’s little doubt that the nature of iPhone OS and Android devices—with touch screens, extensive app stores and capable browsers—have capti-vated their audiences and proven that web-browsing and app-use is not just possible, but close to addictive on these devices.
Build it and They Will Come?
Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices Build it and They Will Come?
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The complexity of navigating the mobile market doesn’t end at figuring out what operating system to aim for. A number of important factors drive what kind of ser-vices and products you can bring to the mobile market:
Screen sizeObviously, the screen size of any device dictates how information can be presented in the best way. Digital delivery needs to take into account the entire array from 40-inch desktop displays to 3-inch smart-phone screens. Until recently, a “mobile solution” would go far if optimized for the 3-4 inch display, but with the introduction of the iPad and its competitors, the span has increased from 3 to 10 inches.
NavigationTouch- or button-navigation has a huge impact on how digital content is and can be consumed on smartphones.
Specific hardware capabilitiesAn example: location awareness. An iPad 3G can be location aware – the iPad can’t.
OS and OS versionIf considering building apps, these will not only need to be operating system specific, but sometimes even OS version specific.
Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices Complexity
Complexity
More on this in the chapter “Apps vs. Browsers”.
Browser capabilitiesEven though web standards are, by now, mature, they are also still evolving. And in order to benefit from phone-specific capabilities, many browsers have special capabilities that are outside the standards. As an example, take into consideration the Webkit framework used in Apple and An-droid phones (and others). It has specific methods for detecting the popular swipe and pinch gestures along with screen rota-tion. If taking advantage of these methods, you will get a great experience on those phones – but need a fallback option for other phones.
The complexity will increase in the years to come. In the past years, the speed of innovation has been overwhelming, and it will continue unabashed. Since the ex-pected lifetime of a smartphone is short, the manufacturers are not afraid to launch features that are unique to a particular phone – and thus unsupported by the rest of the market.
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Apps are extremely popular both with consumers and content creators, but not all app stores are created equal.
Apple’s App Store was the first to create the category for smartphones. Interesting-ly, it wasn’t launched until a year after the first iPhone hit the stores, but it quickly proved how apps created a new platform dimension for the up until then relatively self-contained smartphones. It wasn’t a
Apps vs. Browsers
Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices Apps vs. Browsers
revolution that you could install applica-tions on your phone – smartphones had been able to do that for years – but the quick and easy access to the market was an instant hit.
Apple’s App Store now features more than 140,000 apps – at number two, the An-droid store only has approximately 30,000. Blackberry and Nokia Ovi are around 5-6,000 each, while Palm and Windows fin-ish last in the race. As for growth, it’s again Apple and Android that take the prize.
When delivering content to a modern smartphone, you basically have two op-tions: create an app or live in the browser with a more traditional web-content offer.
Here are some key aspects to consider when evaluating the two options:
Apps can do things browsers can’t!It’s important to stress that apps can do wonderful things, and provided you have the right product or content, they can be a great investment. With apps, you can do great things in terms of navigation as well as look and feel.
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Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices Apps vs. Browsers
App interaction is hard to get rightA recent usability study by Jacob Nielsen highlighted just how hard it is to make intuitive navigation on the iPad. This is not due to lack of ideas or options, but simply because the touch devices are so new to the general public that conventions are non-existing. Users simply don’t know where they can click and what they are supposed to do. Make sure your app inter-face is simple and straight-forward – don’t get lost in fancy ideas.
A browser-based solution has a lower entry barrier than an appThe browser is preinstalled on the smart-phone; your app is not. To get to the app, several steps must be taken: go to the app store, search for the app you want (you need to know the name beforehand), click
it, enter password, wait for download, wait for install – and you’re off. Now, this can be a speedy process, depending on how tech-savvy your customer is. But no mat-ter how you look at it, clicking a link on a website is a much simpler process.
Browser-based mobile view-ers are a better match across platformsUnfortunately, developing apps is a plat-form-specific game. They only work on specific devices. Today, the map is relative-ly easy to chart with iPhone OS, Android OS, WebOS, Symbian, Windows Mobile and RIM OS. But other operating systems are on the way, with even more fragmenta-tion to come.
To make matters worse, Android presents a particular challenge. By now, it’s frag-mented so heavily into versions, that mak-ing an app compatible with all versions requires a lot of work. As an example, the official Twitter app for Android only works on 1/3 of Android devices.
Browsers also come in different flavors. But the protocols, formats and web stan-dards provide a mature framework to develop within.
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Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices Apps vs. Browsers
App stores are walled gardensApple’s unpredictable and dimly-lit poli-cies on what content is allowed and what is not allowed highlights a major problem for app developers: you are not in control of your distribution. You are subject to an approval process which is, at best, slow and strict, and at worst, unpredictable and censoring. Not so in the browser.
There’s a general sense that if you can get the user to download and install an app, you’ve really engaged with him, and you can maintain an ongoing relationship.
Don’t bet on this to be true, no matter what. Apps are plentiful, and you will still be fighting for attention.
Make sure your normal web-site has a workable mobile version without FlashYour website is the entry point for most of your mobile audience – make sure they have a good experience
Links are importantIt sounds almost archaic in this web 3.0 world to be talking about the importance of hyperlinks. But none the less, this ba-sic element of the web is still what ties it all together. Sharing interesting content among friends is key. It’s an often over-looked fact that mobile apps provide no global system for sharing content outside themselves or for deep-linking. With apps, you’ve left the sharing to those already in the know who have the app installed.
Those who don’t – the ones that you are most interested in reaching – face the high entry barrier discussed earlier, before they can get in on the fun.
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Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices Tablets – the Expansion of Mobile
Tablets – the Expansion of Mobile
With the rise of tablets and e-readers, “mobile” is no longer equal to just “smart-phones”. The iPad has opened up a new flank in the fight for mobile users, and a multitude of more or less comparable devices have already arrived or have been announced.
This widens the complexity even further, with the possibility of operating systems like Windows 7, Chrome OS and WebOS to be considered as well when discussing mobile strategies.
Tablets need to be considered separately, mainly due to two aspects:
The device and user mindset is radically different from the smart-phone scenarioA tablet user can be a mobile user, but will rarely be in the same mindset. It will often be a laid back situation, casual browsing, entertainment, and not the same focus on quick accessible on-the-spot information. Also, the device has a much larger screen, begging for color, life and detail.
The operating systems likely to dominate this market may be dif-ferent from the Smartphone OS’sAs long as the iPad is the go-to device on this market, you will have it relatively easy. They are both based on the iPhone OS, albeit with minor modifications, and Apple has done a good job of iPhone/iPad com-patibility. Apps can be ported, and browser behavior is identical.
However, this is not a permanent situa-tion. It’s likely that we’ll see an increas-ing amount of tablet computers reaching considerable market share, based on either Windows 7, WebOS, Chrome OS and others. When this happens, the world will once again become even more complex.
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Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices The Future of Flash and HTML5
You can’t read five articles about mobile platforms without six of them being about Flash and HTML5.
It’s the million dollar question: is Flash dy-ing? Is HTML5 taking over? And what is HTML5 anyway?
Let’s shed some light on the situation.
The Future of Flash and HTML5
Prior to the mobile data revolution – led by Apple’s iPhone since 2007 – Flash was a safe bet when creating cool, interactive, rich content that would be accessible “ev-erywhere”. Flash is still available on more than 99% of computers and still a safe bet when making non-mobile content.
Flash is Everywhere – Except Mobile
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Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices Flash is Everywhere - Except Mobile
However, for mobile content, three major obstacles have appeared:
Apple is not supporting Flash on neither iPhone nor iPad. While this was originally seen as a potentially temporary situation, it’s recently become abundantly clear that Apple will NOT include support for Flash on their mobile devices any time soon. We are tempted to add EVER.
Until June 2010, no other smart-phones were able to run Flash either, due to the heavy resource consumption. With the recent release of Android 2.2, code-name Froyo, support for Flash has been included. However, as the previous chapter on Android fragmentation pointed out, this doesn’t mean that Flash content will be playable by the majority of Android devices out there any time soon.
Existing Flash content was de-signed for keyboard and mouse input, not touch-screen devices, and for much larger screens than the smartphones offer. Thus, the vast majority of flash content out there will not work as intended on smartphones.
Adobe is Moving On
Adobe, the company behind Flash, is do-ing what it can to increase support for Flash on mobile devices, but it’s an uphill battle and the inclusion in Android comes very late. Adobe has been smart about their product strategy, though: they are not hinging everything on Flash, rather they are publicly expressing their support for HTML5 and have announced their dedication to developing the best produc-tion tools for this standard, just like they today provide the best production tools for Flash. This does not mean that Adobe is leaving Flash dead in the water – they will continue to push for mobile inclusion, and they are the first to point out that Flash is still the most widely used content platform for interactive, rich content for everything non-mobile.
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Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices What is HTML5?
After all this talk about Flash, it’s time to take a look at the supposed adversary, HTML5. What is it, and how can it be use-ful?
HTML5 is the upcoming and latest revi-sion of the HTML standard. The HTML5 specification is currently only a draft in progress, but the draft specifications have been adopted by a number of browser ven-dors. Technically, HTML5 is an extension of HMTL4 with some modifications to existing tags, but primarily with additions of new functionality.
Today’s browser support of the draft is partial at best. The major browsers differ in their (partial) implementation of the draft. As an example, here’s an overview of how different browser versions support the popular HTML5 <video> tag, enabling the browser to play back video without the use of third party extensions:
What is HTML5?
You can use HTML5 specific tags on your website today – they’ll just be ignored if ac-cessed with a browser that doesn’t support them.
Source: Webmonkey
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Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices What is HTML5?
As you can see, HTML5 support is current-ly missing from Internet Explorer, which has a market share of 60% on non-mobile devices. Only the upcoming IE9 will have partial support for the HTML5 standards as currently drafted.
What gives HTML5 momentum and suc-cess – apart from the absence of Flash on smartphones – is the fact that the entire browser community has rallied around the standard as “the future of the web”. This was clearly demonstrated at the recent Google IO 2010 conference:
Looking ahead, there’s no doubt that HTML5 will mature into a final and docu-mented standard, that all latest versions of all browsers will support it, and that it will be a cornerstone for online content.
HTML5 is the future of the web – but not the present. When looking broadly at the market, it’s still way too early to bet on HTML5 as the only way to go. A huge number of users will not be able to see your content, if you base it solely on HTML5 – you will need solid fallback solutions. For mobile users, however, the situation is dramatically different.
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Source: Google I/O 2010
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Strategic guide for bringing content to mobile devices HTML5 and Mobile Users
As displayed above, HTML5 is not a ”mo-bile standard”, but because of the wide use of Safari and Chrome-based brows-ers (which both support HTML5 through the Webkit framework) on the popular smartphone devices based on iPhone OS and Android, and because Flash (until very recently) was unavailable on any smart-phones, the Flash versus HTML5 debacle has had a prominent position when dis-cussing mobile strategies. Selected use of HTML5 has grown immensely in actual use on mobile devices. Simple video play-back has been the ”killer application” for HTML5.
HTML5 and Mobile Users
Even if HTML5 was fully approved and adopted by all browsers, it’s important to stress that HTML5 wouldn’t be capable of doing all the things Flash is able to do today. Consider HTML5 as a useful sup-plement that raises the bar considerably for what kind of advanced user interaction you can do in a browser without the need for third party plug-ins like Flash. But in its current draft, it still has a way to go to reach the bar set by Flash.
So, what does this all mean? It means that as long as you’re in the browser of a mo-bile device, there are limitations to how fancy you can make your service.
HTML5 is Not a Full-Fledged Alter-native to Flash
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Profitable Magazine Publishing - Conclusion
Summarizing the points made in this whitepaper:
The mobile arena is messy and com-plex, and it’s not getting better any time soon. It will increase in complexity and continue to change rapidly
There’s no magic solution – it will take effort to bring your content to a mo-bile audience if you want the full effect of reaching your audience on the move
Don’t get bogged down in technol-ogy – focus first and foremost on your content and your product offerings
Repurpose, re-think. Respect the size of the screen, the nature of the device and the mindset of your audience
Focus on iPhone and Android for now – create a Webkit optimized experi-ence without using Flash
Make sure your normal website has a workable mobile version without Flash – this is the entry point for most of your mobile audience
Flash is not dead – but on mobile devices you need to ignore it for now
HTML5 is the future of the web – but not quite the present. Use it for video playback on mobile devices
Cover the mobile browser first, then consider apps if your need for advanced interactivity is high
Conclusion
Profitable Magazine Publishing - Acknowledgements
Sources:
http://www.businessoffashion.com/2010/04/fashion-2-0-why-
brands-should-focus-on-mobile-web-not-mobile-apps.html
http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/30/mobile-data-traffic-rise-40-fold/
http://www.juniperresearch.com/shop/products/whitepaper/pdf/
Mobilising,%20Socialising,%20Monetising!%20-%20S.pdf
http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/05/where-on-the-web-is-html5
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ipad.html
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_
auletta
http://technologizer.com/2010/05/23/android-fragmentation/
http://www.examiner.com/x-38819-Dallas-Web-20-
Examiner~y2010m3d30-Mobile-data-traffic-to-rapidly-increase-
within-5-years-Will-cost-to-consumers-follow
http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/05/29/the-age-of-the-mobile-
mash-up/
http://gizmodo.com/5199933/giz-explains-all-the-smartphone-
mobile-app-stores
http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2010/02/25/report-app-stores-
compared-store-growth/
