In January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated quite plainly:

We're not going to build a phone.

Later this week, he is expected to announce a Facebook Phone.

But the rumored announcement of a Facebook Phone isn't just a repudiation of that plan, it's also another step on Zuckerberg's slow journey torward accepting the superiority of so-called "native apps" over the Mobile Web running on HTML5. 

For years, Zuckerberg has championed the Mobile Web's ability to deliver a consistent user experience across multiple devices with a single development effort. But last summer Zuckerberg admitted defeat and publicly changed course on HTML5. As ReadWrite noted at the time:

Facebook released a completely rebuilt version of its iOS app for iPhone and iPad today, changing a fundamental aspect of the company's mobile strategy. Gone is the Web-centric, HTML5 approach. In its place, Facebook has rebuilt the iOS app using Apple’s native framework. The result? A more streamlined, faster app for the iPhone and iPad.

And, in fact, the iOS native Facebook app has proven faster, smoother and quicker to load versus its Mobile Web counterpart.

Native Apps Heavily Preferred

Facebook seems to have learned its lesson, but what about the rest of the mobile industry? A new survey by Compuware APM confirms that users greatly prefer native apps to the mobile web. (Compuware APM summarizes the survey in this press release. The full survey is available here, though it requires fairly extensive registration.) For example, the survey's key takeaway:

85% of mobile device users prefer apps over mobile websites. 

The primary reasons users prefer native apps over mobile websites are:

1. Apps are considered more convenient
2. Apps are faster
3. Apps are "easier to browse"

Nonetheless, a slight majority (56%) said they have experienced issues recently with apps. App crashes and app launch problems were by far the biggest problems.

Ironically, the preference for apps over the Mobile Web places additional pressure on developers. It turns out that users demand more from a mobile app than they do from a mobile website. For example, 4 out of 5 app users expect an app to launch in three seconds or less. Other preferences include

The App Revolution

The scope of the "app revolution" is astounding. As Compuware notes, more than 30 billion iOS apps and 15 billion Android apps have been downloaded so far - and the total is now growing by more than 1 billion every month.

In the U.S., the average number of apps per smartphone user is 41. This is a 28% increase over the average from a year ago. Despite this increase, however, total time spent by users with apps has remained relatively flat: 39 minutes per day versus 37 minutes per day in 2011.

As most people know Apple's App Store and Google Play far outstrip competing platforms in the number of apps available. 

Facebook will reveal this Thursday exactly what its "new home on Android" really means. If the company wants anyone to actually live in that new home, though, it had better be fully optimized for the Android platform. Smartphone users can be an unforgiving lot.

(NOTE: According to Compuware, the survey involved 3,535 smartphone and tablet users (1,002 in the U.S., 509 in the U.K., 509 in France, 508 in Germany, 502 in India and 504 in Japan) over the past six months. The company claims it is a statistically projectable survey with a margin of error of +/- 1.6%.)

Facebook photo courtesy of Shutterstock. 

Google has had a brainstorm, and now plans to use the collaborative and sharing features of Google Drive as bait — essentially to lure third-party apps into the Google fold.

In a blog post, Google software engineer Brian Caims outlined how developers can integrate Google Drive features into their apps -- features like instantaneous saving in documents and spreadsheets, or multi-user collaboration on such files in real time.

One of three services to debut with the Realtime API is Neutron Drive, an in-browser coding app that stores text and source codes in Drive. Using the API, Neutron Drive users can now see realtime coding changes. 

Other companies that have launched alongside Neutron Drive with the Realtime API are Gantter and Draw.io. Gantter offers collaborative project scheduling, while Draw.io is a diagramming app that specializes in sharing and collaborating on things like flowcharts and UML (unified modeling language) diagrams. And for those interested in channeling their inner Will Smith from The Pursuit of Happyness, Google released a collaboration-enabled Rubik's cube that reflects real-time changes with the new API.

A Subtle Social Strike

But there's more going on here than meets the eye. If you view the announcement in the context of the ongoing platform wars, Google's API release sort of resembles a secret social strike.

Some have postulated that Google+ is less a social network than a social layer, connecting all of Google's disparate properties together. It's probably a bit more than that. However, Google's approach to social has always been more inclusive, dating back to the way its concept of Circles simply creates a Venn diagram of social connections. Facebook, by contrast, essentially creates a series of walled gardens around each user. (Anecdotally, I'd say that's because the average user shares more on Facebook than Google+.)

Google provides free search, email, calendaring, word processing, maps — you name it. But Google's revenue stream is sharing your data across its services to build up a comprehensive profile of who you are that it can sell to advertisers. Collaboration — between services, between users — is in its DNA. So it makes perfect sense for Google to try to rope third-party apps into its own collaborative services, as it's doing with the Drive API.

Facebook may not feel particularly threatened. It has a number of advantages — in particular, its Social Graph API, which remains the benchmark for determining the preferences of individual users. In addition to third-party apps and sites that use Facebook APIs for authentication, Facebook's pages themselves serve as a foundation for dozens of apps, and the company is making an aggressive push to add mobile apps as well.

And, of course, there's its billion-plus user base. Nothing at Facebook really screams collaboration, however — not even the Microsoft-powered, Facebook-authenticated Docs.com effort of a few years ago. 

LinkedIn might be more vulnerable. While users can use its InMail and other tools to publish information, LinkedIn provides networking, not collaboration. Google already supplies both, and has made a bid to lure more apps onto its platform, as well.

The bottom line is this: Google's new Drive API will probably prove most valuable to small, business-oriented apps whose developers view collaboration as a feature, and not the central business model. It's a savvy bid by Google to build a developer base.

Additional reporting by Nick Statt

Addicted to Facebook? You're far from alone. Quite a few of Facebook's 1 billion+ users spend a large portion of their day logged in. Some passively check status updates and messages during breaks from work. Plenty of others are glued to social games like FarmVille and Words With Friends. 

Using the latest statistics from AppData, we pulled together a list of the seven most addictive Facebook apps. Sure, there are plenty of others grabbing attention (Bejeweled Blitz anyone?), but these seven rank especially high on the monthly and daily active users charts. We skipped third-party services like Spotify and Microsoft Live in favor of the truly addictive, fully integrated apps on which people seem to be wasting the most time. 

7. Words With Friends

Words With Friends has been everybody's favorite social Scrabble copycat for a few years now. Still, as new Facebook apps have risen and fallen, it remains one of the most widely used on the platform. Anybody who's ever played Words With Friends knows why. It's truly addictive for the same reason that Scrabble has long been a beloved board game, but this newer digital take on the classic bakes in your actual, real-life friends and lets you play multiple people at once to make it pretty much impossible to stop clicking. 

6. Diamond Dash

If you've ever played Bejeweled or Candy Crush Saga, you've essentially played Diamond Dash. It's incredibly simple: look for groups of like-colored diamonds and click on the cluster to make each one disappear. Rack up points. Neglect your professional duties. Repeat. 

Diamond Dash has the same basic pattern-seeking premise of many other games, but with as dead-simple of an approach as possible. That way you'll never get frustrated and the game's design, and visual hints ensure you'll keep clicking away until you get fired. 

5. Trip Advisor 

What better way to kill time on a slow work day than by daydreaming about fleeing your cubicle for some faraway escape? That's apparently what a lot of people do, among other things, on Trip Advisor's Facebook app. It doesn't have as many daily active users as the popular Facebook games, but more than 10 million people use it every month. 

On Facebook, you can plot your world travels on Trip Advisor's map, list where you'd like to go and see where your friends have been. It's pretty simple functionality. To be sure, much of the app's activity is probably coming from TripAdvisor.com, a robust travel search utility into which users can sign using their Facebook account. For a travel search site, there could hardly be a more successful social strategy than what Trip Advisor has pulled off. 

4. Texas HoldEm Poker

It should come as no surprise that virtual gambling is addictive, just like the real thing. With 38 million users, Zynga's online poker empire is the world's most popular. While you can't play for real money just yet, Zynga is planning to lobby lawmakers in Washington D.C. and California to change that. Later this year, Zynga is going to launch its first legit gambling product overseas. In the meantime, you can continue to waste your workday challenging your friends in one of Facebook's most popular social apps.  

3. CoasterVille 

Riding on the success of FarmVille, Zynga's CoasterVille has pretty much the same premise, but in an amusement park setting rather than on a farm. 

It's kind of like Sim City's less-popular cousin Sim Coaster, but doesn't require anywhere near as much thought.  Like so many of the most addictive Facebook games, CoasterVille pretty much tells you exactly what to do and is designed to keep your attention fixated on the game. Ride by ride, you can build your own theme park on the company dime while other people around the world suffer.

2. FarmVille 2

Surprise! FarmVille is really popular.

You knew that though, because even if you don't play Zynga's wildly popular social farming simulation game, you've seen your friends harvesting crops via status updates auto-barfed out by the app. At any given moment, the sequel to 2009's FarmVille can reliably be found in the top three most used Facebook apps. Every day, millions of people spend hours raising virtual farm animals and crops while our collective productivity withers away like a neglected bed of corn.

1. Candy Crush Saga

There could hardly be a simpler and harder-to-lose game than Candy Crush Saga. And that's what makes it the perfect Facebook app: You can sit there and mindlessly line up similar-looking pieces of candy, zapping each batch and scoring points as you go in Dr. Mario-like fashion. 

If you get stumped, zone out or wind up distracted by Facebook notifications, the game continually reels in your limited attention span with subtle visual animations that hint at what your next move should be.