Home Mobile Web or Native App? Chomp’s App Search Shows Both

Mobile Web or Native App? Chomp’s App Search Shows Both

The debate between native mobile apps and HTML5 mobile web apps is probably not very important in the minds of most consumers – but it’s big for developers. Starting today the venture funded iPhone app recommendation app Chomp now includes both in its search and social recommendations. That means more and different apps for users.

Mobile Web apps don’t require Apple’s approval to be accessible, but for now Chomp is limiting its index to the thousands of mobile Web apps that have been checked and approved by Apple. (Did you know Apple maintained a list of approved mobile Web apps?) None the less, it’s an important development in the app ecosystem.

App discovery on mobile devices is a big challenge. Apple announced in January that iPhone users have downloaded apps 3 billion times and analysts expect the total mobile app ecosystem across all platforms to grow to 50 billion by 2012. That number could be even bigger if it included Web-accessed apps.

Chomp believes it offers a better app discovery process than Apple’s own iTunes store (VentureBeat has a good in-depth overview). The company has served up tens of millions of app recommendations since launching in January and now has a few million reviews posted.

The Google Mobile team launched an app-discovery feature in its search results this week but doesn’t include mobile Web apps and is very limited. Chomp’s approach is better, but is still limited to Apple-approved apps. The company says it wants to keep users safe with a good experience, but it’s also clear that basing its Web app index off of Apple’s is the simplest way to include any Web apps. Chomp also requires that you download and launch a specific app for app discovery, rather than surfacing web apps through everyday casual mobile Web use.

Chomp looks and works much better today than it did at launch and is worth checking out. As a news event, bringing together native and mobile web apps into one search interface is definitely notable and likely a sign of things to come across the whole app ecosystem. Combine this with Google’s recent announcement that it is advancing access to hardware for mobile web apps and the division between the mobile web and native app ecosystem feels less important every day.

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