uncopyrighted Prepared by jTribe, July 2009; http://jtribe.com.au

Mobile OS/Browser ReportA Report of Australian Mobile Browser Landscape and

Approach for Mobile Web App Strategy

jTribe

Prepared by jTribe, July 2009; http://jtribe.com.auuncopyrighted

Content and Scope

A. Overview of the current Mobile Browsing Marketplace, with a focus on Australia

B. Mobile Browsing Trends

C. Recommended Mobile Browsing Strategy

uncopyrighted Prepared by jTribe, July 2009; http://jtribe.com.au

A. Overview of the current Mobile Browsing marketplace, with a focus on Australia

Prepared by jTribe, July 2009; http://jtribe.com.auuncopyrighted

Who is using mobile browsers?

Many phones on the market include a mobile web browser. Even low-end phones include a web browser but the majority of users would not make use of the browser due to the limitations and perceived costs of their mobile phone plan. Generally, the low-end plans are not made for browsing the web. Low-end plans target the consumers of voice and SMS services.

It is the medium and business plans as well the new lifestyle plans (i.e. iphone cap) that encourage the user to use the web browsers. These plans come with the medium to higher-end phones. Users that are most comfortable in using mobile browsers are the corporate users and lifestyle users of smart phones. Operating systems for smart phones are RIM Blackberry, iPhone OS, Palm OS, Symbian S60, Windows Mobile and Android.

uncopyrighted Prepared by jTribe, July 2009; http://jtribe.com.au

Mobile OS

22%

48%

13%

15%1%1%

BlackberrySymbianiPhoneWindows MobileAndroidPalm

Source: 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone2. http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=208743. http://www.rcrwireless.com/article/20090224/WIRELESS/902239977/-14. http://metrics.admob.com/5. jTribe market research6. http://metrics.admob.com/2009/09/august-2009-mobile-metrics-report/

• Nokia with Symbian S60 has currently the largest market penetration.

• Blackberry is currently most popular phone in US. However, 50% Blackberry users say next phone will be an iPhone. Blackberry has large penetration in corporate user base in Australia but will give up some of its market to Apple in the next years.

• Google’s Android OS is gaining momentum and we expect that it will reach more than 10% market share in the next year in Australia. Many device manufacturers are using Android for their next generation of phones. Devices are already available in Australia.

• Windows Mobile and iPhone OS have currently the same market size but will fall behind quickly due to the incredible popularity of the iPhone.

• Windows Mobile is going to loose market share and will be even with with Google Android for the next 2 years.

• Apple has aggressively gained market share in the last 1-2 years. Their OS is not only the basis for phone devices but also for lifestyle devices like the iPod. This will strengthen their position even more and will make the iPhone OS the most popular OS by 2010.

• Nokia will be overtaken by Apple by 2012. [2]. As it turns out the iPhone is already overtaken Nokia in August 2009 in the smart phone area. [6].

• The relevant platforms for the next 2-5 years will be iPhone OS, Android, Symbian, Blackberry and Windows Mobile.

• Palm has less significance in Australia but could pick up due to their newly released WebOS platform.

2009 >2010prediction

14%

28%

34%

10%

11%2%

Current and future state of Mobile OS

uncopyrighted Prepared by jTribe, July 2009; http://jtribe.com.au

The Mobile Web

Source: 1. http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-mobile-bp-20080729/2. http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=659233. http://mobile.fairfax.com.au/

Mobile Web:• The term Mobile Web describes web apps and web

sites that are targeting mobile users through mobile browsers. W3C’s mobile web standards are used for creating mobile web sites.

W3C Best Practices (excerpt) [1]:

• Exploit device capabilities to provide an enhanced user experience

• Take reasonable steps to work around deficient implementations

• Carry out testing on actual devices as well as emulators.

• Provide only minimal navigation at the top of the page

• Provide consistent navigation mechanisms.

• Do not use image maps unless you know the device supports them effectively.

• Do not cause pop-ups or other windows to appear and do not change the current window without informing the user.

Content vs ApplicationMobile web applications and mobile web content sites have different characteristics which are important for our clients.

• Mobile web content - Simple content pages without dynamic elements. Usually based on XHTML as it is supported by all major mobile browsers. Mainly used by content provides like news publishers.

• Mobile web applications - dynamic content and high degree of user interaction to produce the content from a backend system. Technologies used are AJAX and JavaScript. Mainly used by application providers like Google for apps like Calendar or Latitude.

uncopyrighted Prepared by jTribe, July 2009; http://jtribe.com.au

Mobile Browsers

Source: 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbrowser

• There are approximately 20 different mobile browsers on the market (full list at [1])

• jTribe’s experience shows that the relevant mobile browsers in Australia are:Blackberry Browser, Symbian S60 Browser, Safari for iPhone OS, Internet Explorer Mobile,, Opera Mobile, Android Browser.

• Support of standards - the browsers listed above have most Web 2.0 features. However, sophisticated Web 2.0 websites are less usable on a mobile phone browser and making sure they work on the different mobile browsers is very costly.

• Technolgies - Many vendors are basing their browsers on WebKit. WebKit is an open source web browser engine release by Apple and is used in many mobile browsers like Safari on the iPhone and iPod Touch, Symbian S60, Android, Palm WebOS and several others.

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Mobile Browsers are different

The user experience on a mobile browser is very different to a desktop web browser. The differences should to be acknowledged when designing a mobile suite of web pages. Many mobile web sites are therefore much simpler and follow a different navigation paradigm to their desktop relatives. Here is a brief list of the top differentiators:

Limitations:

• Screen size makes desktop optimised web pages not very usable on a mobile browser (see mobile style later). This is also a problem when accessibility requirements exit.

• Some devices/browsers do not support plug-ins like Flash. Rich content and sophisticated web2.0 features might not work.

• It takes long to render large or graphically rich desktop web pages on a mobile device due to lower bandwidth and/or less computing power of the device This leads to user frustration.

• Testing a mobile web site on the variety of exiting mobile browsers is almost impossible.

Distinct Features:

• Location data now available in new Safari (Google uses HTML 5 location feature already on iPhone for Latitide)

• Screen rotation - can be used to improve user experience

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B. Mobile Browsing Trends

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Mobile Browsing Trends

• The new generation of mobile devices has created a ”gold rush” in mobile application development. Besides native applications as promoted by Apple there is are companies like Google who push towards web based applications that run on mobile browsers. In the last months Google has released several web based applications for WebKit-powered browsers with a sophistication that could only be provide by native apps so far. With the new standards like HTML 5 and more processing power on smart phones the will be many more applications released for mobile web browsers.

• The trend for web based applications seems to provide applications that are optimized for the different devices. Each devices has it’s own user experience guidelines. Apple provides “User Interface Guidelines” for iPhone apps. These guidelines are enforced for native apps and are encouraged for web applications to provide a consistent usage model to the end- user.

• Key web technologies that come into play for web applications are AJAX and JavaScript in combination with XHTML for static pages.

• The navigation model for mobile apps is very different to the desktop browser versions. The trend is to break information into smaller units. The data is loaded from the server and rendered on the device using JavaScript libraries. While presenting the first unit the remaining units are dynamically loaded in the background using AJAX and are promptly available when the user needs them. This approach offers minimum latency and impressive usability.

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Mobile Content SampleGoogle is at the forefront in terms of cross-mobile web pages. Here is an

example how Google applies different styles for desktop Browsers and Mobile Browsers

Firefox on PC Safari on iPhone

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Mobile App SampleGoogle apps supports Android and iPhone and other WebKit-based browsers.

Forms and on-screen keyboards allow for less complex forms. Everything is simpler on a mobile browser

Calendar web app on Android

Calendar web app on iPhone Safari

iGoogle web app on Palm WebOS

Prepared by jTribe, July 2009; http://jtribe.com.auuncopyrighted

The big Challenge

The biggest challenge for Mobile Web providers is the “Testing Challenge”. Testing the web site for all the different browsers and devices very complex and costly.

Rarely all devices are available for testing. Mobile development is still a very niche area that requires specialised skills.

The degree of testing increases with the degree of dynamic features used (i.e 3rd party JavaScript libraries may not be

uncopyrighted Prepared by jTribe, July 2009; http://jtribe.com.au

C. Recommendations for the mobile browsing platforms

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Recommended Platforms

Based on the future state of the market and our experience we recommend to focus on the five biggest browser platforms.

Safari for iPhone and iPod Touch

Web Browser for S60

Blackberry Web Browser

Android Web Browser

Opera Mini Web Browser

uncopyrighted Prepared by jTribe, July 2009; http://jtribe.com.au

Recommended Approach

We recommend that a mobile web application strategy is developed in stages in the following order:

• Start with Lowest Common Denominator: build a mobile website using simple XHTML and web 1.0 technologies to guarantee compatibility with most mobile browsers.

• Then build specific Web Apps for better user acceptance and user experience on the particular device

• iPhone

• Symbian S60

• Blackberry

• Android

• Opera Mini

This approach will make the web app available to a large percentage of mobile users and at the same time provides optimal user experience for the particular device and mobile browser.