Month: June 2014

Categories
Platforms

Building a business not just an app? Start with the revenue model

The number of app developers using business models that don’t rely on app store payments is increasing. In some cases this is sophisticated app developers adapting to the market. In many cases it’s simply a greater number of existing businesses starting to use apps as a channel to reach potential customers. We can use the data from our Q1 Developer Economics survey to examine which strategies carry the most risk and which have the greatest chances of success. Could you use one of the more successful models for your next app?

business models - mobile platforms

We asked developers to tell us all of the revenue models they use and also whether their business was loss making, breaking even, making a slight profit, or generating comfortable profits. Revenue model popularity and a sample of profit & loss distributions are shown below.

Build apps for other people

[tweetable]Contracting is the most popular revenue model and also the one associated with the second lowest probability of making a loss[/tweetable] and third highest probability of comfortable profits. Of course, contract work also has strictly limited upside – it’s not really possible to build a scalable business around contract work without becoming a global giant consulting company. That said, the [tweetable]majority of developers would be better off if they spent most of their time on contract work rather than their own apps[/tweetable].

App store payments and advertisers

The next most popular revenue models, in-app advertising, paid downloads, in-app purchases and freemium are all relying on directly monetising an app. Together they are the four most risky models with the lowest chances of profit. [tweetable]Paid downloads are the least successful revenue model[/tweetable]. Although easy to implement there are very few cases where offering a straight paid download will create a financial success. Even on iOS, despite a still growing user base, the paid download market appears to be contracting fairly rapidly in the face of free app alternatives with in-app purchases. Despite the advantages of the in-app purchase model, it’s still quite far behind other models.

Selling services

Subscriptions are the next most popular and also relatively low risk and successful. However, implementing subscription based services is usually more complex than selling apps or virtual goods. Many subscription based businesses are simply using an app to sell subscription content. Another interesting possibility for developers in this area is to resell generic cloud services by adding value on top. As very basic (and already well served) examples, re-sell storage by adding document collaboration or photo management features on top.

Providing services that app developers can resell is one model for those selling developer services. Others include tools or services that help developers design, build, market or monetise their apps. This is one of the lower risk models with a good probability of profit. It follows the classic advice that when there’s a gold rush, the best thing to do is sell picks and shovels. There are still plenty of opportunities in this space (where are all the tools that help me prototype animations?) but also others with too much competition (some BaaS providers are already shutting down).

Selling stuff

[tweetable]Apps that make money through e-Commerce are the most successful in terms of making comfortable profits [/tweetable]and have by far the lowest risk of making a loss. Most developers using this model had existing e-Commerce businesses and have just added mobile apps as another sales channel. There are some startups with mobile first commerce apps though. More than 50% of developers using this model make comfortable profits related to their apps, so the cost of building apps is more than paid for by sales through them.

Affiliate and CPI programs allow developers to sell other people’s stuff. Using an affiliate program could be selling products related to your app through Amazon. Alternatively, a travel guide app might integrate a flight search SDK that provides a native search experience within their app – the developer gets paid whenever anyone books a flight. Affiliate programs were very popular on the web and their native counterparts are likely to be as well. CPI programs are for selling other developers apps, or at least getting users to install them. The top free-to-play games have extremely high ARPU and as they try to grow rapidly it makes sense for them to pay almost anything less than their ARPU for a new user (since new users boost chart ranking and thus organic installs). Other apps are a good place to advertise apps, so this is likely to be quite a lucrative option until either there’s an oversupply of quality advertising inventory or a crackdown on free-to-play games.

Royalties or licensing

We skipped per-device royalties or licensing in the middle of those last two. Overall this doesn’t have much lower risk than relying on the app stores or ads. However, this is inherently a higher risk strategy with bigger rewards for success. It usually involves building a product for large companies or even OEMs. The downside is that the number of direct customers in the target market is usually quite small. This is usually a model for those with great connections, a lot of funding, or both.

Build a business, not just an app

The app stores made it really easy for developers to sell software to a very large audience for the first time. With over a million apps each for iOS and Android, that is no longer the case. Discovery is hard and larger, more sophisticated organisations are dominating the top charts. If you have a great idea for an app, see if you can find a great revenue model to fit it. If not, try to come up with another idea. Outside of the VC-funded startups, developers that succeed will be the ones that think about where their revenue will come from before they’ve started building the app.

For more information of the success recipe of mobile apps, check out our App Economy Profits report.

Categories
Tools

How to choose a good mobile ad network

You probably have already tried a handful of mobile ad networks, spending the good part of a day every time to integrate them and have experienced so far both feelings of disappointment and satisfaction. If it helps, you are not the only one.

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The road to building a successful app business is not an easy one and you have to constantly experiment with new ad networks and technologies to find the one that best matches your app’s unique needs.

It doesn’t have to be a painful experience though and here are 5 different angles to look at a mobile ad network before you decide to invest your time and give it a try.

Angle #1 – Fill Rate

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A quick look at your mobile analytics provider will show the countries or regions the majority of your users are coming from.

Geography: If most of your users are coming from North America, for example, you should actively search for mobile ad networks that have a high fill rate in this region otherwise you will not be making money at your full potential.

Consistency: This is slightly tricky to evaluate beforehand, but aim for a monetization partner that in the last 3 months had consistently high fill rates in the regions you are most interested.

Many in-app advertising solutions have developed mediation technologies and partnerships with ad exchanges to combat these issues and while touting near 100% global fill rate, make sure you evaluate on hard numbers and not just marketing talk.

Angle #2 – eCPM

Choosing a mobile ad network based only on its average eCPM has a caveat because eCPM measures performance on a relative basis. Only when combined with the fill rate and your estimated monthly ad requests you can get a good sense of your expected earnings in absolute terms.

Have in mind that there are many factors that will cause significant fluctuations on eCPM, including the seasonality of advertising campaigns and the quality of traffic you send from your apps. You should anticipate fluctuations, especially if you are working with a single mobile ad network, and use the network’s average eCPM to get an “order-of-magnitude” feeling on what to expect.

Angle #3 – User Experience

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People who download a free app are well-aware that it has to be funded somehow and they expect that the app might include a form of advertising.

App developers, however, have a choice whether they want to deliver a spammy user experience or interrupt the normal user flow to display ads and by choosing to do so they consciously take the risk that user retention can fall dramatically.

If quality user experience is important to your app, some mobile ad networks are more flexible than others and have started embracing native advertising technologies to offer developers more control on how and where ads get displayed.

Angle #4 – Technology

You can also evaluate a mobile ad network based on its technology.

SDK: A lightweight SDK that has been battle-tested enough will ensure your app’s performance will not be impaired at any time.

Dashboard: A fully-featured dashboard can enable thorough monitoring and effortless fine tuning which helps in both maximizing your revenues and increasing transparency.

Ad Server: This component is the most difficult to evaluate but among others, low-latency infrastructure and yield optimization algorithms are the backbone for a good eCPM, so you can use that as a proxy.

Angle #5 – Payment Options

We’ve covered previously the different payment options offered by major mobile ad networks and is important to be familiar with them well in advance in order to avoid unpleasant surprises.

Payment methods: Mobile ad networks often support a limited number of payment methods and you have to make sure your individual circumstances can be covered before you start integration.

Payment schedule: This is usually not a deal breaker, but some networks offer a faster payment schedule than others.

Sum Up

Experimenting with various solutions to find the ones that best match your needs is critical for a successful app monetization strategy but due to the sheer volume of mobile ad networks out there it can get quickly overwhelming.

Avocarrot have explored here 5 different dimensions that can hopefully help you get a well-rounded picture of any mobile ad network you come across and quickly decide whether or not you will invest some of your time to give it a try.

Categories
Languages

Understanding Swift: 5 things app developers should know

The most surprising thing to come out of Apple’s WWDC event this year was a new programming language for iOS and Mac development – Swift. To the sceptical this might not seem like anything more than a way to entice more new developers to build apps exclusively for Apple platforms and lock them in. While investment in developer tools is always partly about making a platform attractive to developers, this move has far more benefits and strategic implications.

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1. What is Swift?

Swift is a statically typed, compiled language, interoperable with the Objective-C and C code that are currently used to build Apple’s platforms and the native apps that run on them. However, it also has the feel and features of more modern scripting languages. In creating Swift, Apple has attempted to give developers the best of both worlds, the performance of native code but the convenience and productivity of a scripting language.

2. Faster, Safer and Less Code

In fact, Apple claims that Swift is faster than Objective-C, yet at the same time developers are freed from the burden of explicitly declaring types (they’re inferred), or manually managing memory (it uses automatic reference counting). With features such as “optionals” (a generic way of checking if things exist before using them) and type safety (no default attempt at an implicit cast), the compiler is able to prevent many of the worst bugs that crop up in the C family of languages while reducing the amount of code that has to be written and maintained. Another productivity enhancing change from the legacy of C is the elimination of header files, keeping interface definitions and implementations in one place.

3. Interactive

Although reducing the amount of code required to perform simple tasks is productivity enhancing on its own, even greater benefits are obtained by reducing feedback cycles. In the same way that a simulator allows more rapid testing of new code and ideas than building for a device and installing, live coding environments provide almost instant feedback as the code is written. Such tools are not traditionally available to compiled languages but Apple has created “Playgrounds” for Swift. These don’t provide live coding for an entire app but allow developers to experiment with new algorithms or bits of UI in such an environment before copying them into an app. Similarly, whilst being able to inspect variables in a debugger is useful, it’s even better to be able to interact with an app while it’s running. Swift provides a REPL (Read-Eval-Print-Loop) for this, much like the debug console for JavaScript in most browser development tools.

4. Functional friendly

The language also has functions (and closures) as first class objects with a much more readable syntax than Objective-C’s blocks, making it easier to apply functional programming techniques. This could be particularly helpful for fans of Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) – a programming paradigm that has been gaining in popularity for app development amongst a lot of smart developers. It helps to eliminate complexity when dealing with things like user input and asynchronous network communication – two key areas for most mobile apps. A team at GitHub actually created an FRP library for Objective-C, called ReactiveCocoa, which is extremely well thought out but forced into the most painful syntax by the language.

5. What’s the catch?

Sounds a bit too good to be true, right? Being a compiled language and using reference counting, rather than a garbage collector, developers are still responsible for avoiding memory leaks due to strong reference cycles. These happen when two objects refer to one another, directly or via a chain of other objects. So, while the language may be beginner friendly, it makes it fairly easy to write code that leaks memory. To avoid this, developers need to understand how the memory is managed for them and how to break these cycles. It’s not horribly complex but it’s a long way from not having to worry about memory management at all. That said, most iOS apps will get away with leaking a bit of memory – usually the device will just silently kill them in the background when the memory is required for another app.

Being compatible with C and Objective-C makes Swift a fairly big language – there are quite a lot of concepts and bits of syntax to learn for a new developer, rather than one coming from an Objective-C background. Also, as a type safe language, Swift is going to be much less forgiving to the novice that would prefer the compiler just figured out what they meant when comparing the integer 1 with the floating point value 1.0 or the string “1”.

Swift is currently an iOS & Mac only proprietary language. Unlike Objective-C, which has an open source compiler and runtime (used by Apportable) there’s not likely to be any way to use the code on Android or other platforms. However, most developers wanting a cross-platform approach are unlikely to have started with Objective-C anyway, so this is not really creating significant extra lock-in. It might just persuade some developers choosing a cross-platform tool to target iOS because it’s easier, to create a fully native app instead.

Why does it matter?

First, more developers. Although modern Objective-C has a lot of good points, it’s an evolution of a very old language. Syntactically it’s quite different from most other modern languages – it borrowed from Smalltalk while the rest of the world followed C/C++. This creates a barrier to entry for developers in other languages because the code initially looks alien. Additionally, any language that has pointers is a hard sell and steep learning curve for complete beginners. Swift fixes those things and should make developing for Apple products attractive to an even wider audience.

Second, more productive developers. Greater productivity means lower cost of development and/or shorter time to market. The combination of more rapid development and lower fragmentation versus Android should help to keep iOS as the first platform developers target, even as its market share continues to shrink through the faster growth of Android globally. This is very important if Apple intends to stay exclusively at the premium end of the market.

Last but not least, happy developers. Although several cynical commentators have latched onto the proprietary language lock-in angle, it seems rather unlikely that giving developers a new language to learn is going to lock them into developing for a platform when the barrier to exit is, well, learning a new language! Instead consider that Apple is primarily aiming to retain developers through loyalty rather than lock-in with this particular move. It should not be underestimated how much good tools can contribute to the enjoyment of daily development work. If Swift can deliver on its promises then other platforms will have to be that much more attractive to tempt the best developers away.

Categories
Platforms

Confessions of a BlackBerry developer

The BlackBerry developer initiative

It’s been almost 2 years since the first beta release of the BlackBerry 10 SDK. Back then, RIM decided to launch the “happy developer” initiative, which was comprised of two parts. The first was targeted at some of the largest software houses and the second, at the long tail of developers. The first part was successful, since most of the big software houses are now supporting BlackBerry10 either by building native apps or by porting their existing Android apps into BlackBerry World.

confession-of-blackberry-developer

The second part of the initiative, which was aimed at indie developers and hobbyists, is a different story. It seems to me that BlackBerry tried their best, shipping beta devices all over the world, getting the developer relations team on the road, in order to help developers face-to-face, giving incentives like the 10k$ commitment (money that was delivered every month, just as promised), and, most importantly, engaging with all developer communities or individuals from around the world 24/7.

The need for change

BlackBerry went through some difficult times during the past 2-3 years. The company seemed to be unable to get it right, and the negative media attention wasn’t helping. The BlackBerry 10 launch was not as successful as the company would have liked.. The legacy BlackBerry devices were outselling BlackBerry 10 devices quarter after quarter,..
A change was sorely needed in the company’s direction and plans. Cue John Chen. Once Chen was named CEO he brought a whole new set of ideas to BlackBerry, and a new plan of action.
Success comes after a company becomes viable and profitable at the same time. Under the new leadership, BlackBerry started adhering to timetables and deadlines and showing all signs of following a specific plan.

There’s just one thing that did not change, and that’s their commitment to developers. Yes, they are shorter on staff (the developer relations team was merged into another team under Martyn Mallick), the VP of Developer Relations, Alec Saunders, is now in charge of QNX cloud, aka Project ION. But the tools are still getting updates, and the roadmap, which is more important in my opinion, is active, showing that there is a plan for the BlackBerry 10 platform. BB 10.3 is now just around the corner new devices are on the way, and the future looks a little brighter for a company that went through hard times but now looks ready for a comeback!

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There’s also been a change in the central message that BlackBerry is attempting to communicate to developers. When BlackBerry 10 was first introduced, this message was “Flow-Connect-Extend”. It was all about the core basics of the new platform.

For the 10.2 update the message was changed to “Adapt-Sense-Understand”. BlackBerry had more features available for developers, such as headless mode (i.e. apps running in the background), and use of geolocation in apps. Now this message has changed once again, and it’s all about the Internet of Things (project ION). We still don’t know too many details, but it has to do with big data in a secure environment (QNX cloud) that can be used by developers to create a whole new breed of apps.

The decision

Back to reality. As a developer targeting BlackBerry 10 myself, I realize that publishing an app is a twofold process.
The first step is developing the app. BlackBerry offers a completely risk-free environment, with fully engaged support and tool options. During the past couple of years, the SDK has been updated many times, each cycle an improvement over the previous one.

The second part is what comes after publishing the app. This is where success/time spent in part 1, takes place. Success means different things to different people. It might be measured in terms of money earned, number of downloads or even a high rating for their app in the BlackBerry World app store. The truth is that developers don’t have many tools at their disposal to reach their goal, whatever that may be, and BlackBerry’s current status in the top markets is not helping improve this situation..

But what about the countries and regions in which BlackBerry is still a best-selling handset manufacturer, such as Indonesia, South Africa, Nigeria and the Middle East? It might not be as easy as it sounds to target specific markets. Let’s take a look at the distribution of downloads and revenues around the globe (I’m using my own app as an example).

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Downloads vs. Revenue maps of a freemium app with more than 125k downloads (May 2013 – May 2014)

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It’s clear that BlackBerry has to improve its standing in major markets. Many think the main reason for low device sales in key countries is the lack of apps – but maybe it’s actually the other way around. Perhaps we have a formula that looks something like this: device sales -> more users -> more profit for developers -> more developers -> more apps
At the end of the day, engaging with BlackBerry is going to be a personal decision. There are some important parameters still missing from the BlackBerry platform, which might be keeping many developers from migrating to, or at least adopting, BB 10. A lot of these parameters, however, are not strictly related to actual development, i.e. coding.

But developers should keep two important factors in mind: BlackBerry 10 is still one of the newest OSs out there, which means there’s a lot of room for growth. Also – BlackBerry still is, and will continue to be, a leader in enterprise solutions, which is translated as a strong brand name. This combination indicates that there’s potential for BB10.

If I were to give developers some advice on whether to adopt the platform, I would say go for it. Built it or bring it – i.e. either go native or bring over your Android app. The tables may turn sooner than you think.

Categories
Languages

Is HTML5 about to make a comeback?

The web is losing and apps are winning. At least that’s what the most recent data from Flurry says – 86% of time on mobile devices is spent in an app other than the browser, up from 80% last year. Does that really mean the web is losing? What about apps built with HTML5? Is the implementation technology more important than the distribution mechanism? Why should anyone care? A number of new tools and frameworks are maturing that should make it much easier to build great mobile sites and apps with HTML5. Could they stop the shift from web to native apps, or even reverse it?

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Why the web is losing on mobile

Modern web browsers and standards were designed for a desktop computing environment and they built upon a base that was designed for sharing linked documents. Mobile computing environments have capabilities and constraints that desktops don’t. Native mobile app platforms were designed for building highly interactive, animated, apps utilising hardware graphics acceleration. The result is that apps running in a mobile browser are disadvantaged in terms of performance, user experience and access to device functionality versus their native counterparts.

The app is the new browser bookmark. People have favourite services and sources of information or entertainment even though a great deal of substitution is possible in most cases. Providers have to compete on user experience and that creates a bias towards native apps. You want to check the weather every day? You don’t search for a weather forecast every time, or find a favourite weather site and bookmark it, you download a weather app. Need to catch up with your friends on a social network? You don’t open the browser, type a URL or go to a bookmark and wait for the latest updates to download, you get update notifications pushed to you by the native social network app, or when you open the app it has already downloaded the latest content in the background. For frequently accessed apps, the native versions have much less friction, as well as a nicer user experience.

What about hybrid apps?

Delivering a web app in a native wrapper allows it to access device functionality and reduce some regular usage friction. However, it doesn’t fix performance (indeed on iOS it makes it worse), nor make it easier to deliver a great user experience. Another problem with delivering a packaged web app that uses a system WebView is that the functionality of the WebView itself can change with OS updates. Android recently switched to a new Chromium-based WebView and broke or crippled lots of hybrid apps. The flip-side to this problem is that WebViews upgrade slower than browsers; on Android the WebView is currently tied to OS upgrades (which are still lacking from most manufacturers) while the Chrome browser continuously auto-updates. This means it’s a long time before it’s feasible to start using new standards added to the browser specifically to tackle mobile issues. A hybrid app is also still subject to app store reviews and policies. It may be possible to update functionality without an app update in the store but the platform owner still controls what developers can and can’t do.

Another popular complaint about hybrid (and native) apps is the loss of ability to cross-link versus the web. I believe that Facebook’s recent App Links project puts all native apps (including hybrids) about on a par with web apps here. It may be possible to link to any web page but many modern web apps only have a single page. What’s actually needed with a web app rather than a web site is the ability to link to app states. This is only possible if the developer enables it by setting up routing for URLs to app states – native apps can already do this and App Links solves the “what if the app isn’t installed” problem with web fallbacks or store links. If platform providers enhance app interoperability then native (and hybrid) apps could significantly exceed the capabilities of the web here.

Engagement versus ease of access

As discussed above, any content or services you access frequently create less friction by providing native apps. Less friction enables more engagement and a virtuous cycle of greater usage. On the other hand, new or infrequently accessed content and services have extremely high friction if you need to download an app before you can do anything else. Here the web has significant advantages over native apps. The companies who really don’t get this are the ones that have a full screen popup asking you to download their app every time you visit their website on a compatible device! Another way to look at the Flurry stats linked at the top of the article is this: exclude games (which have almost always been native for performance) and social networking (which falls firmly into the frequent access category, plus a lot of the time will be using an in-app browser anyway) and the browser still has more than a third of the remaining mobile usage time. That doesn’t sound quite so bad.

New frameworks fill the gaps

With the threat of being relegated to the “infrequently accessed” category of apps, the web development community has not been sitting around doing nothing. A new framework recently into public beta, famo.us, attempts to solve the major performance problem for animated web app UIs. Their current approach is a series of clever hacks involving minimal manipulation of a very flat DOM structure. However their JavaScript APIs will also render to WebGL in future (when it’s sufficiently widely available, ahem, Apple). The approach is promising and the demos are impressive. Currently their homepage (on both my retina iPad Mini and Nexus 4) kinetic scrolls with a stutter that makes my 2006 Symbian device look slick, so there’s a way to go before they’re ready to come out of beta. Note that using Famo.us JavaScript APIs starts to make building web apps look more like creating a native app.

Another framework close to its 1.0 release is Meteor, a new way to create real-time web apps very rapidly. They fix common issues with the responsiveness of web apps out of the box – having to poll the server for new data and wait for it to update the UI after user interaction. The latter is achieved with a technique called latency compensation (UI is updated with local data immediately, then fixed if the server returns something different). The former is down to having long-running bi-directional connections between client and server rather than a more traditional RESTful API. Meteor actually supports native client apps too but with the ease of creating the web front end it would be unusual for developers not to have both web and native options if they go down that route.

Although there are lots of new and interesting frameworks in development I’ll highlight just one more that’s in a fairly mature beta stage. Ionic is a framework designed specifically for building hybrid apps. It’s built for performance and to provide common UI components and interactions out of the box so it’s easy to make an app with a native feeling user experience. The default styling is very similar to, although deliberately not exactly like, iOS 7. The major disadvantage to this approach is that while it works on recent iOS and Android versions you lose the broader cross-platform and device compatibility. It’s not for building mobile websites or desktop web apps. As such Ionic is building on HTML5 purely as an implementation technology and abandoning the browser. However, as it’s still running in a WebView developers retain the privileged position of being allowed to download new code on iOS.

Native user experience

I listed performance and user experience as two separate issues for a good reason. Despite all the great efforts at resolving performance issues for web apps, native user experience is not just about performance. For some apps it’s natural to take over the full screen and provide an immersive user experience. Games fall into this category, unfortunately they’re also the category of app most in need of full native performance. The majority on non-game apps use some standard platform components and need to follow platform user experience conventions. This makes it easy for users to learn how a new app works; navigation and controls work in the same way as most of their other apps. In this sense when we say “native” user experience we mean aligned with the platform culture and conventions rather than compiled to native binary code. The folks at Ionic are right not to mimic iOS 7 too closely. The more native looking an app’s UI, the more users will expect it to behave exactly like one (and get frustrated when it doesn’t always). A phenomenal amount of effort is required to make an app look and feel just like a native one when it’s not actually using native controls. Even if this can be achieved, the platform will change and the app won’t, making it stand out like a sore thumb until it can be updated (again at significant effort). This is an issue for all cross-platform environments that have their own rendering engine rather than wrapping native controls.

What the technology wants

Marc Andreessen famously said that the eventual application model on mobile will be the web application model, because the technology wants it to work that way. Having every app stored on a remote server and the latest version always updated to the device when it becomes available is a superior model to downloading and periodically updating local apps. This technological advantage applies almost equally to hybrid apps, assuming the native wrapper rarely needs changing. Native apps that automatically update is a step in the right direction but doesn’t aid lean development practices like split testing and continuous deployment. The latter are so valuable in figuring out what to build quickly that there are plenty of entrepreneurs and businesses out there who would build mobile apps with the web model if they were good enough for their customers.

The next wave?

Consumer apps that don’t have highly desirable unique content or features are going to have to compete on user experience for the foreseeable future. For most that will mean native apps. However, building native apps is significantly more expensive than building cross-platform web apps. Not all of the people who pay for apps are going to prioritise user experience. The next generation of software for large enterprises right down to small businesses is going to need a much better user experience than the last but the current state of web technology is probably good enough.

Revenues from consumer mobile software may look quite attractive but the bulk is in Free-to-Play games and is highly concentrated amongst a handful of publishers. The majority of the growth in that market is in Asia. A more interesting opportunity for many developers may be the only slightly smaller but faster growing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market for businesses. As mobile devices become increasingly essential in our work lives as well as our personal lives, maybe we’ll see more of that total usage time in business and productivity apps.

Conclusion

So, is HTML5 about to make a comeback? In a way. If the first wave of mobile computing adoption was primarily about consumers, the next wave will see many more businesses getting serious about using mobile devices to enhance productivity and collaboration. I suspect the use of HTML5 in business apps to be much more successful than in the consumer space. Possibly we’ll see a return to the browser but for now the hybrid app looks more likely. General purpose business apps like time and resource tracking or project management will have large enough user bases to justify native client apps, although of course they’ll need web access too. The more specialised the app, the more likely it is to be a hybrid app than a fully native one.