Mobile Device Convergence and HTML5

Thanks to roland for the picture.

“Technological convergence” is a fancy name for a simple idea: that over time, different technology systems will evolve to let you do similar tasks. Looking at mobile, device convergence means that if you can do something with a particular phone right now, you would expect to be able to do it on ANY phone before too long.

For years, mobile device convergence faced tremendous obstacles. But finally a real solution is emerging: an important technology called HTML5. Let me explain.

An app made for the iPhone cannot run on a Blackberry, and vice versa. In general, native mobile apps have to be remade for each platform, more or less from scratch. This gets tremendously costly very fast. It has proven a giant obstacle to mobile device convergence to date.

In other words: Making just an iPhone app is straightforward and affordable enough. But to remake it for Blackberry, then again for Android, then again for Windows Mobile, etc., adds up fast. The cost can total many tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

For organizations with very large IT budgets (think Fortune 500), that's fine. For the vast majority of companies, though, developing an app for every platform is not realistic. So in practice, only one or two platforms will end up being supported. Only those device types will be part of the full corporate IT stack.

Enter the solution: HTML5. HTML5 allows IT to create rich, high quality web applications that behave much like native "apps", doing most of the things a regular app can do. The difference is that an HTML 5 app only has to be created once. If engineered well, the app will run on any modern smartphone, and is likely to automatically work on most new phones over the coming years.

iPhone and Android support much of HTML 5 now. The next generation of devices from Blackberry and Nokia will also, and makers of other mobile device platforms (including Microsoft) are working hard to catch up. By the end of 2011, expect the vast majority of new devices to ship with strong support for this technology.