A walled garden approach to the mobile web is stifling innovation ...

This is a guest post by Carlos Domingo, Director of Product Development & Innovation at Telefonica Digital

The development of the web is under threat. The part of it consumed on mobile phones is in decline -- and it's this part that's arguably the most important for its future. As smartphones have exploded in popularity, the web is becoming increasing mobile. Unfortunately, innovation here is in danger of being stifled by a backwards move to closed ecosystems based on proprietary closed apps written for mobile OS.

Walled gardens don't work. Forcing people to remain within a roped-off section of the web, cutting them off from the open transfer of data, content, connectivity and community, just doesn't fit with human behaviour.

However, that's exactly the situation we find ourselves in today. Mobile internet is developing in a series of silos, with consumers locked in to a single device or ecosystem. Innovation will only continue to flourish if mobile is set free. You only need to look at the history of the web to prove this.

Return of the browser wars
The battle between Netscape and Internet Explorer in the 1990s, known at the time as the browser wars, ended with Microsoft emerging triumphant. Internet Explorer grew into a near monopoly -- helped by its bundling with Windows -- with a base of 95 percent of all internet users. The problem was that as soon as it achieved this dominance, innovation froze. Development of the browser -- the foundation stone for any online content or service -- ground to a halt and in 2003 the company announced that Explorer would no longer be available as a standalone product.

These were dark days for web innovation. It was only with the formation of the Mozilla Foundation in 2003, the launch of its Firefox browser a year later and then Apple launching Safari and Google introducing Chrome that the open web on the desktop really took off. And this is the environment that enabled the creation of innovative platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and eBay.

The parallels between the mobile industry today and the browser market back then are striking. Two companies effectively dominate the smartphone market (Google and Apple) and consumers and developers are being corralled into closed ecosystems where innovation is controlled and fragmentation is growing.

It's vital the mobile ecosystem is opened up so that innovation can flourish as healthily as it does on the desktop web. HTML5 can let us achieve this.

HTML5: The saviour of mobile
HTML5 is the latest version of the language of the web invented 20 years ago by Tim Berners-Lee. It offers better support for multimedia services and enables seamless web experiences across a range of devices, including tablets and smartphones.

The key question is: Can HTML5 deliver the same or better experience for web services on mobile as native applications? The challenge to date on iOS and Android has been a software preference for native apps which therefore run faster and have greater accessibility to device capabilities. HTML5 apps are treated like second class citizens and don't get access to key parts of the device (things as basic as the camera) or technologies that allow for the best performance.

At Telef?nica R&D we are working on a solution with Mozilla and other industry players -- a true web OS built in HTML5, designed from the ground up to run the web on mobile and where everything in the device is accessible from the browser. This web OS is known as Firefox OS and it will lead a new disruption on the mobile web in same way Mozilla led the disruption of the desktop web ecosystem.

HTML5 can not only deliver the same performance as native apps, in many cases it will offer a better experience. For a start, discoverability, a growing issue for developers, will improve dramatically. HTML5 apps have a URL and can therefore be shared and found when you search the web. HTML5 apps will also download data as needed and store it offline, making updates much less painful (if native apps need an update, the whole app needs to be downloaded again). Plus HTML5 apps can adapt to their environment, meaning you can switch from desktop to tablet to mobile without having to install a different app on each.

In no industry is it healthy to have so much control in the hands of so few and history shows us that progress and innovation will suffer as a result. While we expect Firefox OS to be very popular with customers and developers, perhaps the greatest measure of success will be the extent to which it drives openness across the entire industry as Firefox did on the desktop.

Source: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-12/11/innovation-mobile-web

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