If you like Google, mobile development and cloud platforms, this is going to be a good week for you.

Google will have lots of goodies this week for developers - and consumers - at its I/O developer conference in San Francisco. We might see some new hardware, a couple updates to Google’s major platforms (Maps, Android, Chrome, Google+ and Play) and most likely a surprise or two. But, really, the week belongs to the developers.

Historically, I/O has been an occasion for Google to get its developer community together and introduce them to the newest tools, tips on how to develop for Google apps and best practices. Until the last couple of years, I/O (which Google started in 2008) was all about developers and less about big product announcements. In 2011, Google announced Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich as well as Chromebooks from Samsung and Acer. In 2012, the rage was Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, the Nexus 7 Android tablet and the spectacular unveiling of Google Glass. This year, we expect Google to once again focus heavily on its developer community - with fewer major product announcements.

From a hardware perspective, Google may or may not announce new devices during I/O, but don't expect an event like 2012, when Google-branded hardware stole the show. If Google does announce hardware, we expect that it will release (or at least update) some kind of Nexus tablet and/or smartphone (probably through LG), an update to its Chromebook line (likely through Samsung or Acer) and maybe something to do with Google TV.

Otherwise, Google I/O will be a developer’s paradise. Here’s what mobile, Web, cloud and social developers should be looking forward to:

Android Update: Probably More Jelly Beans

Chrome Android by Paul Wilcox

Google’s new head of Android, Sundar Pichai, told Wired not to expect any major product announcements at I/O. Considering that Pichai is head of Android and Chrome OS, we tend to think that he was specifically talking more about Google’s computing platforms and less about new hardware. 

That said, Google will update Android one way or another this week. The rumors surrounding I/O are that Google will issue an iterative update to Jelly Bean, Android version 4.3. If true, that means that Google is not yet coming out with Key Lime Pie, the next named version of Android. 

Regardless if we see a new version of Android or just a Jelly Bean update, there will be plenty of Android news at I/O. Some major themes:

• Gaming: Google will host a variety of game-related developer sessions at I/O. It will give developers best practices, design tips and ideas on taking their games to the next level. Google’s Ingress augmented/alternate reality game will be featured, with several Ingress battles taking place at Moscone West during the week. Most of the Android gaming sessions will take place on Day 1 (Wednesday, May 15) of I/O.
• Design & Performance: Google’s biggest objective with Android during the week will be working with developers to make their apps function seamlessly, look better and present dynamic user experiences. Most design and performance sessions will take place on Day 2. 
• Google Play: Google will be giving developers tips on how to best monetize their apps and get seen on its app store, Google Play, throughout the conference. Google Play sessions will be held on Day 2 & 3. 
• Maps: We expect a big update to Google Maps in both user interface, functionality and developer tools. Location is a key ingredient in how Google uses Android and there will be a variety of location- and Maps-related sessions on all three days of the event.

Chrome OS Tools, Apps & Features

Chromebook (by Mark Hachman)

Again, if we can believe Pichai, there will not be any major new announcements for Chrome. But there might be a new Chromebook announced at I/O and there will definitely be new feature updates. 

Chrome OS and the Chrome browser are important to Google because they are the company’s window to the Web. Chrome OS is also a key cog in Google's cloud strategy - the company wants to tie developers to the operating system and get them to run their apps in Google’s cloud platform. Many of the announcements and sessions at I/O related to Chrome will focus on functionality, cloud adoption and Google Apps (like Maps, Gmail, Drive etc.). On Monday, Google announced that Gmail, Google+ Photos and Drive will be merged to give users 15GB of storage. That type of integration will be prominent in how Google steers developers toward developing for Chrome at I/O.

• Drive: Google will be making a bid to get developers and users to tie their Chrome OS and browser storage to Drive, its personal cloud product. Google will push tying use of its Apps to Drive, such as in the Day 1 session titled, “Integrate Google Drive With Google App Scripts.”
• HTML: Chrome is for the Web and of the Web. Hence, HTML will always be a big part of development for apps on Chrome OS and the browser. I/O has several sessions on how to create mobile websites optimized through Chrome with HTML. It will also have sessions on Dart, Google’s programming language meant to accelerate function and performance in HTML Web apps. 

Google+ Enhanced Communication

The biggest improvements to Google’s social network likely concern communication. Google Babel is rumored to be the company’s integration of all of its messaging platforms into one product - likely to be rolled out through Google+. Google will spend a lot of time showing developers how to use Google+ as a “one true sign-in” platform, much like Facebook uses your profile to let you sign into a variety of websites. Google will also announce new features to Google+ designed to get developers to build more apps for the platform and increase engagement - from brands and consumers. 

Location, Location, Location

Google Maps will get some heavy play at this year's I/O. Maps will likely get a user experience overhaul - look for that to be a major component of Wednesday morning's keynote. Google wants Maps to be integrated everywhere, from Android to Chrome to every third-party app in between. On Day 1 and Day 2 it has a variety of sessions dedicated solely to Maps integration. That includes HTML5 and mobile Web visualization, indoor maps, API integration and discovery.

Only A Little Glass

Google Glass was the big announcement at I/O 2012. It will likely be a major theme at the keynote on Wednesday. The hype that surrounds Glass requires Google to mention it prominently. Yet, when it comes to developers, Glass will only be a sideshow to the major events around Chrome, Cloud and Android. 

Google is holding just four announced Glass development sessions, all on Day 2. Essentially, these sessions are Developing For Glass 101, and will include how to use the Google Mirror API.

While much of the discussion around HTML5 and its ability to deliver compelling mobile applications centers on client-side performance, a potentially bigger problem resides on the network.  Two trends in technology are on a collision course and threaten to make the web experience a growing digital bog for users on their mobile devices. Websites and applications today are increasingly complex and large in size, and at the same time a growing number of people are accessing the web over wireless networks.

As a result, browsing through websites on your mobile device can be like slogging through a marsh.

Credit: Tracelytics Basically, bigger applications are being jammed down increasingly congested wireless networks for display on mobile devices. While telcos have scrambled to make more and faster pipe available - 4G, for example - they haven’t been able to keep up.

Something has to give. Until now, the user experience was sacrificed. And while it may seem like an insignificant First World Problem if users have to wait a few seconds for an app or web site to load, even a few seconds delay negatively impacts top-line revenue for web publishers and corporations that rely on the web, as Tracelytics has pointed out.

I recently spoke with Manav Mital, CEO of Instart Logic a stealth company founded by a team of big data engineers from Aster Data. I asked Mital to talk some more about Instart Logic and its plans. And while Mital wasn't yet ready to reveal details on how Instart Logic significantly improves web performance, he did give some insight into how the company has approached the problem.

ReadWrite: Your founders have Big Data analytics backgrounds. And since then you’ve hired some networking, virtualization, CDNs and large scale web services gurus from companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, VMware, Citrix, Akamai, Adobe and Mozilla. It’s an unusual, diverse team. What are you doing differently?

Mital: That wide variety of backgrounds is critical to helping us think differently about the "Last Mile Bottleneck." The basic challenge we gave ourselves was how do we radically speed up the Internet over the last mile without asking a publisher to change anything on their web infrastructure or an end user to change anything on their device? Could we not only dramatically improve user experiences for the current generation of rich web sites and applications, but also make possible an entirely new class of web experiences?

That’s what we are building at Instart Logic. We all saw the same problem and felt the need for a better solution, one that we could develop by drawing upon concepts from our different backgrounds and unifying those ideas. It's not a problem that any one approach could solve, be it CDN or Big Data or any other technology. We needed to start from scratch using shared learning from different technological approaches.

ReadWrite: What is this “Last Mile Bottleneck?” 

Mital: In the past, the delivery bottleneck existed between the servers hosting the web application and the access points on the edge of the Internet. Legacy approaches to speed up the web focused on solving this bottleneck in the core of the Internet. In the age of the mobile and wireless Internet, these legacy technologies fail to address the biggest source of problem today – the Last Mile, which is the part between the edge of the network and the user’s device. 

ReadWrite: So you’re saying the biggest bottleneck has shifted to the edge of the network. What happened?

Mital: Two converging trends are exacerbating the Last Mile Bottleneck. On one hand, web applications have grown more complex, more interactive and more data intensive. On the other hand, users are increasingly connecting to the Internet over some sort of a mobile or wireless network, causing a huge congestion in the last mile. 

How’d we get here? Publishers and companies have replaced static websites with complex web applications that provide immersive visual experiences and encourage higher levels of interactivity, oftentimes tapping into social media data sources to make sites more personalized. These applications have to be far more intelligent and context-aware. User identity, location, previous behavior, social graph, time of day, and probable intent are all now key components factored into what is displayed by sophisticated web applications. 

At the same time, more and more users are accessing web applications from tablets, smartphones and laptops through WiFi and wireless networks. Corporations, too, are moving hosted and on-premise software into the cloud. That means their workforces must access these applications via the public Internet. While carriers and providers of WiFi connectivity are moving quickly to expand the size of the wireless pipe (4G LTE is the most prominent example), they simply can’t keep up with the exploding volume of data coming over those pipes. 

So you have two trends – richer web applications that are bandwidth hogs, and a wireless pipe that is increasingly congested – that combine to increase application load times and diminish end-user experience on any device.

ReadWrite: So what have web publishers and companies done in the past to deal with the Last Mile problem?

Mital: Publishers and businesses tried to overcome the bottleneck by compressing images to reduce the data footprint of a web application. Too often, those images appear washed-out. Some publishers and businesses have reacted by dumbing down their mobile and tablet sites, stripping out complexity.

Neither of these approaches help get applications to the mobile device. Worse, they provide a much less engaging user experience.

Alternatively, companies have resorted to what I would call extreme measures. Often major online e-commerce sites actually keep 20 different versions of product images to better handle the huge variation in network conditions and devices accessing his site. 

We don’t think web publishers and companies should have to compromise on the user experience. That’s why we founded Instart Logic.

ReadWrite: Instart Logic has been in stealth. Do you have any customers actually using your product?

Mital: Yes. We've been running a private beta program for some time, and completed it in December 2012. The vast majority of Instart Logic's beta customers – including a Fortune 500 company – are now using our service in production for mission-critical applications. These are paid customers, and they're using our service to drive conversions and increase user engagement across a broad set of industries including retail, travel and hospitality, enterprise SaaS, online gaming, and media – sectors where immersive and interactive experiences are essential.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Many website owners say to themselves, “I want my site to look great on mobile, but I don’t know where to start.”

If you are in the business of building and designing websites, you cannot ignore the fact that many people are going to be visiting your sites on their smartphones and tablets. The Web and the mobile browsers remain one of the top ways that users interact with websites and if they have trouble on their smartphone, there is a good chance they are not coming back.

That’s where responsive design can help.

Responsive design is a concept where you build your website once and then format it so it can adapt to any screen size that accesses it. Designers use HTML5 and CSS to build the sites and set parameters so the content will resize itself whether the user is in vertical or horizontal viewing mode, on a tablet, desktop or smartphone or even a screen as large as a television.

We employ responsive design here at ReadWrite. Go ahead, test it out. If you are on a PC browser, shrink or enlarge the window and watch the content respond. If you are on a tablet or smartphone, switch between portrait and landscape. 

See what happened? ReadWrite looks great no matter what size it is, no matter what device you are using.

Responsive design has been in vogue since about 2011. One of the first sites to employ it was The Boston Globe when it launched its new digital publication, BostonGlobe.com. 

“We are now looking at how we display and order content differently from screen size to screen size,” said Jeff Moriarty, Boston Globe VP of digital properties in an interview last year. “This ‘responsive content’ concept is emerging and we are starting to see in data that users want different types of content depending on their context and the device they are on. We have to now think about how content performs differently from the biggest screens to the smallest, how that content is organized and even how headlines are written from platform to platform.”

What’s The Best Way To Build A Responsive Website?

The first thing to think of when building a responsive site is simplicity. Web designers love to show off that they can design the hell out of a website. They fall in love with their code and all the cool things that it can do. 

“I think the challenge for me is to use it cautiously - and not try to be overly artsy with it,” said Ryan Light, a website designer working at CoachUp, a startup in Boston.

Light says that some website builders may over-design for the desktop, making some websites fun to play with but absolutely impossible to navigate.

“I find that a lot of people overdo it on their actual websites that are rendered in the browser,” Light said. “I find responsive design helpful for mobile browsing - but clumsy for Web typically.”

So designers, keep it simple.

Best Practices

There are a variety of ways to go about building a responsive website. French e-marketing company Splio aggregated some of the best practices in a very long infographic, shown below. 

The idea is to focus around content and avoid the pitfalls that certain aspects of websites can create. For instance, pictures and advertisements can be a problem.

Check out the infographic below. What is your approach to building a responsive site? Let us know in the comments. 

Apparently, native apps have won. We even said so right here on ReadWrite. After all, Facebook apparently likes native more. 

Unfortunately, CIOs missed the memo, and the dirty little secret is that most of the world's software, including apps, is written for use, not sale. That means that most of the world's software is not going to follow what Facebook's mobile strategy is, but rather what those stodgy enterprises do.

Those stodgy enterprises? They're all in on HTML5.

I spent Wednesday afternoon with a who's who of enterprise CIOs and CTOs in New York City, talking about Big Data, cloud and mobile. With the Facebook Phone in mind, I polled the group on its mobile applications. Every single executive - not one exception - was building hybrid HTML5 apps, meaning the bulk of the app is written in HTML5 with a native wrapper to improve performance, add camera access, etc.

Every. Single. One.

And not just a few such apps. The bulk of their apps were hybrid HTML5 apps, both for internal employees and for external customers. 

Going Native?

Sure, there were some native apps, though generally not yet written for Android. ("We can't figure out what to do about Android," said one executive of a major financial services firm.) But overall, the CIOs I talked to, and there were roughly 100 in the room, were basing their mobile app strategy on hybrid HTML5 apps.

The CIO needs are different from Zynga's, or those of other consumer app developers. Many of the apps they're building are informational in nature, or have such a stringent need for broad access that these enterprises simply can't afford to alienate a particular mobile device demographic. They need to support iOS, Android, Windows, Blackberry, etc. And with the vast majority of mobile OSes now sporting HTML5-compatible browsers, the time is ripe for HTML5 apps.

Still Hiring For HTML5

The job numbers bear this out. While HTML5 can get pooh-poohed by consumer app developers like Facebook, it remains the hottest technology skill, as measured by jobs, more than holding its own with iOS and Android in absolute number of jobs:

And trouncing both iOS and Android in terms of relative job growth:

This corroborates Evans Data's finding in early 2012 that 75% of mobile developers were using or expecting to use HTML5, a number that seems to have moved from aspirational to actual in 2013. 

Hence, while the media will tend to focus on what it knows best - consumer apps - CIOs are working away on HTML5 strategies. Just ask Accenture. Yes, there are tradeoffs when going HTML5, just as there are tradeoffs when going native. For enterprise CIOs, however, broad, cross-platform access to employees and customers makes HTML5 a winning solution.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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. 

It’s go time. Your business has finally decided to jump into the world of mobile apps. But, where do you start? There are so many decisions to make. Do you develop “native” apps for iOS and Android? What is this mobile Web thing that people keep talking about? What the heck is an API anyway?

Creating a mobile strategy is a matter of both knowing your business and knowing your app options:

• If you're a Main Street shop like a restaurant, dry cleaner or hardware store, you don't really need an app in Apple’s App Store or Google Play. It's a waste of your time and money, and the mobile Web will work just fine.
• If you're a big brand with many different locations, a marketing and advertising team and a high degree of social engagement, an app might the way to go. Depending on your priorities and scale, sometimes both approaches can work.
• If you're a local business looking for sales lead generation, an app is not for you. You want to have your mobile presence easily found by Google’s search engine, access to Yelp and other directories, maps through the browser and so on. The goal is to make it easy for the customer to find you.
• If you're a national chain, you are going to want the same presence as a local business, just with more panache. You might want an app or mobile Website that gives customers directions to your closest, current prices and offer special deals. You might also consider marketing apps like games or contests; they might be tangentially tied to your business, but if they strike sparks with consumers, you've potentially made some inroads for your brand.

To help you make a decision on a mobile strategy, the folks at Mutual Mobile whipped up this fun “decision tree” to help you get from Point A to Point B. Note that Mutual Mobile is a development shop that specializes in the mobile Web and responsive design, so the tree does push in that direction. 

Check out the infographic below and let us know in the comments: What do you want to do with your mobile presence? How do you plan to get started?

It started with a gecko, of sorts. It then became a fennec, a type of winter fox. Now, it is a smartphone, and soon it will be available all over the world.

We are, of course, talking about Firefox OS, the open source, Web-based smartphone operating system created by Mozilla. The company announced Sunday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, that it has partnered with device manufacturers and mobile operators across the world to launch Firefox smartphones in 2013. 

Mozilla also officially launched the Firefox Marketplace, an app store featuring mobile Web applications and websites that will be able to operate on the new smartphones. Both the Firefox OS and Marketplace are optimized towards HTML5 development and open Web standards using Mozilla’s Firefox browser as its backbone. 

Mozilla claimed three initial manufacturers ready to build and deploy Firefox OS smartphones: LG, Alcatel and ZTE. These devices will be distributed to 17 global carriers in nine countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Serbia, Montenegro, Poland, Spain, Hungary and Venezuela. (Note that these are largely developing markets, and the list does not include the United States.) Since the announcement yesterday, Sony has also said that it would build and release Firefox OS smartphones in 2014. On the other hand, market leader Samsung has said that it is not interested in building smartphones for Mozilla (likely due to its investment in the similar Tizen platform).

Mozilla’s Evolution

The seed of Firefox OS came from Mozilla’s first ventures into the mobile browser wars against Android. Mozilla started with its rendering layout engine, Gecko, and applied it to Android as a third-party browser. Initially, the Gecko-boot of Firefox for Android was named Fennec. 

Mozilla then started thinking bigger.

As HTML5 has evolved into the newest open Web standard, Mozilla became a leading developer and evangelist for HTML5 websites and apps. The problem that Mozilla had with smartphones, though, was that it was not possible to tie smartphone hardware capabilities to mobile browsers. If you ever hear of the “Web vs. Native” argument when it comes to apps, the issue of tying Web browsers to smartphone and tablet hardware (like a camera, accelerometer etc.) is central to the issue. Mozilla wanted to fix that and created what it calls Web APIs (application programming interfaces) to access hardware through a browser. 

(See more ReadWrite coverage of HTML5.)

That goal was what ultimately led Mozilla to announce its own smartphones this year at Mobile World Congress. It has dedicated itself to open Web standards and mobile evolution, all in the name of consumer choice. Firefox OS smartphones will be extremely affordable and targeted at emerging smartphone markets where there is still a lot of potential to make a dent in the industry. 

Building The Marketplace

As shown in the rise of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, the name of the game in smartphones is apps. Mozilla plans on leveraging the power of the Web to build out its app store by enabling websites and app developers to create apps for the mobile Web that can easily be integrated into Firefox OS. 

To start, Firefox announced that a variety of content and app partnerships with the likes of AirBnB, Box, Disney Mobile Games, EA Games, Facebook, Pulse News, Sound Cloud, Twitter and others. Mozilla stated that it will have a variety of games, news and media, productivity and business apps.

When it comes to apps built for the likes of iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry, many already have a core of HTML5 and Web-based technology powering them. Apps are often built as mobile websites and then “wrapped” with native properties to help them connect to device hardware before being deployed to the various native app stores. Mozilla’s plan is to eliminate that need to “wrap” apps and let developers build straight for the Web. The potential  is that almost any app that will work in browser can easily be deployed to the Firefox Marketplace, reducing the cost for developing and distributing apps.

We will see the first Firefox OS smartphones in developing markets later this year. Does Firefox OS excite you? Let us know what you think of the project in the comments. 

Guest author Todd Anglin is EVP Cross Platform Tools & Services at Telerik.

For HTML5 developers and decision makers, the most important technologies right now are HTML, JavaScript, CSS, mobile platforms and devices and evolving HTML platforms (browsers and operating systems). But what does that mean in the real world? It means these 10 things in 2013:  

1. Rise Of HTML5 Mobile Platforms

HTML5 has played an increasingly important role building cross-platform apps for mobile devices. So far that has primarily been done using native “wrappers,” such as Cordova, which allow HTML and JavaScript to power apps on other native platforms (such as iOS and Android). This technique is called “hybrid” app development.

This year, though, a wave of emerging platforms will support HTML5 apps as a first-class citizen - no wrapper required! The biggest players will be Chrome OS, which is about to get much more attention from Google; Firefox OS, already scheduled to start shipping on low-end ZTE and TCL devices in Europe; Tizen, a new HTML-focused platform backed by many industry heavyweights, including Intel and Samsung; Ubuntu Phone, which brings the most popular flavor of Linux to phones, again with a HTML-centered ap strategy; BlackBerry 10, which puts HTML and JavaScript at the center of its next-gen app strategy; and Windows 8, which introduced a new HTML and JavaScript development model for it’s “Windows 8 style” apps.   One (or more) of these platforms is bound to succeed in 2013. My money is on Chrome OS and Tizen. With the backing of Google, a revamped developer and consumer push, and the broadest platform strategy (spans mobile and desktop), Chrome OS is very well positioned.

Tizen, meanwhile, enjoys broad industry backing from Intel, Samsung, NEC, Panasonic, Sprint, Huawei and Vodafone (among many others), and engineering stewardship in The Linux Foundation. It shows the most potential to challenge Android as the “more open” (read: more customizable) open source device platform, which should appeal to device makers.  

2. Made For Chrome(kit)

A growing number of sites are once again buildiing Web apps tested to work in only one browser. Like the “Made for Internet Explorer” badges of the 1990s, developers are now proudly advertising “Made for Chrome” in their apps. Not using Chrome? No guarantees.   This trend is likely to accelerate in 2013.   With a rapidly evolving, highlycapable browser platform that is available on virtually every major operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and kinda iOS), and a Webkit foundation that helps deliver a little extra compatibility with other non-Chrome browsers (like Safari and BlackBerry browser), developers are likely to conclude that the “good outweighs the bad” when it comes to building exclusively for Chrome.   In exchange for potentially alienating some users, developers building for Chrome can more aggressively leverage HTML5 APIs and save valuable development and testing time.  

3. IE10 Euphoria - And Pain

Internet Explorer 10 is widely regarded as a huge step forward for the venerable Microsoft browser. With more support than ever for Web standards, IE10 goes a long way to put Microsoft’s browser in the modern HTML5 conversation.   But as fast-updating browsers like Chrome and Firefox race forward through 2013, IE will once again be left looking old and slow. There is a glimmer of hope that Microsoft will evolve IE more quickly: The Microsoft-owned HTML5 Labs, launched originally in the IE9 days, is continuing to publish new “experimental” improvements for IE10 that make it an even more capable HTML5 browser. Baby steps, but still a good sign.  

4. The Death Of IE6, IE7 & IE8

While IE10 will be in the spotlight, the long death march for Microsoft’s older IE versions will continue. Only the most stubborn corporate environments (and China) still require IE6 support, and much of the world skipped IE7 anyway. If you haven't already stopped supporting IE6 and IE7, 2013 is definitely your year.   Dropping IE8 is a bit more of a stretch, but the pressure is on. Not only does IE10’s release make IE8 two versions old (often used as a “clean” support cut-off justification), but jQuery 2.0 will join Google Apps in cutting-off IE8 in 2013. By the end of the year, most developers will conclude IE8 is not worth their time.  

5. The Death Of Android 2.x

Until recently, it looked like we had another IE6 on our hands with Android 2.x (Eclair, Froyo and Gingerbread). According to Google’s own stats, as recently as mid-2012, these versions of Android (mostly 2.3.x) represented more than 90% of all Android devices in use, despite the fact that Google was already shipping Android 4+! Google was failing to keep its Android user base (and ecosystem) upgrading.   Fortunately, the 2012 holiday season seems to have broken the logjam. Usage of Android 4+ (Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean) surged to nearly 40% at the end of 2012. By the end of 2013, Android 2.x will likely account for less than 15% of the market, and Android developers will be able to shift focus to versions 4+.  

6. Responsive Design Goes Mainstream

So far, responsive design has remained on the fringes of Web development - something nice to do “if you have time."   That's about to change. With the lines between PCs and mobile devices increasingly blurred, developers will have no choice but to develop websites and apps that can dynamically adapt to an unpredictable array of screen sizes and resolutions.

(See also The New ReadWrite: Looking Good On Every Screen [Video].)

To ease the way, look for new techniques and defacto standards to also emerge, offering guidance for properly dealing with different device capabilities and form factors.  

7. Mobile Development Overtakes Desktop

It doesn’t take an expensive analyst to see the growth in phones and tablets while traditional PCs fade. Right now is the moment when developers will begin spending more time developing software for mobile devices than for traditional desktop PCs, extending from the consumer market to businesses of all sizes, for both internal and external audiences. If you’re not developing for devices in 2013, you’re either A) maintaining legacy software, or B) missing the boat.  

8. HTML On The Desktop

Just because mobile is on the rise, don’t start writing an obituary for desktop development. The traditional desktop form factor will remain critical for many information workers. But as the PC becomes one among many screens, developers will look for ways to write code that can be shared across the PC and mobile devices.   HTML and JavaScript are perfectly positioned to offer this capability, and platforms like Chrome Packaged Apps and Windows Store Style (WinJS) apps will make this possible. With both Microsoft and Google pushing HTML for desktop app development, developers will take notice and start embracing cross-platform desktop development with HTML and JavaScript.  

9. SPA Time

With the shift of desktop development and increasingly complex mobile apps to HTML and JavaScript, developers will recognize the need for new techniques to build maintainable cross-platform apps. The “Single Page Application” (or SPA) has been on the rise thanks to powerful frameworks like Backbone, Knockout and even Kendo UI. If “RIA” (Rich Internet Applications) was the buzzword in 2010, “SPA” will be the buzzword in 2013.   If you’re looking for the one new technology or concept to learn as an HTML and JavaScript developer in 2013, it's SPA architecture.  

10. HTML Gets Naked (Again)

Now that the W3C has “finalized” HTML5, public conversation and media coverage is going focus on what’s next for the Web standards platform. The W3C is already working on HTML 5.1, the next “snapshot” of the “living standards” work done within WHATWG, the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. But as we move past the “HTML5” bubble, we’ll once again settle-in to talking about HTML, sans version numbers. After all, who wants to talk or write about “HTML5.1” or “HTML5.3”?   Whatever it’s called, the next wave of HTML platform improvements will shift focus beyond the lower-level core at the center of HTML5 (DOM elements, CSS styles, Simple JavaScript APIs like Geolocation) and instead characterize improvements that are important to more robust application development (like ShadowDOM, Web Components, CSS layouts, speech recognition and more).

The HTML conversation (and technology) will continue to evolve, even if the version numbers don’t come along for the ride.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Intel has gutted the HTML5 mobile-app development firm appMobi, acquiring its tools and related staff – but not the startup itself. The move is part of Intel's bid to build out its own suite of developer tools for mobile applications.

According to documents obtained by ReadWrite (see below), appMobi will turn into a pure play cloud services provider, offering developers backend service support for HTML5 mobile applications. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

ReadWrite's 2012 Most Promising Company

ReadWrite named appMobi “the most promising company of 2012” for its work on creating HTML5 solutions for mobile application developers. The company aimed to rethink how developers can use HTML5 for audio and video as well as accelerating performance for Android and iOS. It created Mobius, a mobile video standard that aimed to kill Flash (which ended up dying in mobile anyway) and helped create innovative ways for HTML5 developers to monetize their products. 

appMobi’s most innovative (and controversial) product came in the form of jqMobi, a HTML5/JavaScript framework designed to give mobile developers a mobile-ready JQuery. The company created a proof-of-concept, fully HTML5 game called BoomTown to show game developers that, yes, fully functional mobile games can be built using a mobile browser as a backbone.

Tools And Migration

Specifically, the tools that Intel is acquiring from appMobi include the XDK IDE (Integrated Developer Environment), PhoneGap XDK, GameDev XDK, jqMobi and jqUI developer frameworks, directCanvas HTML5 acceleration, the Mobius Web browser along with testing and debugging tools.

The tools most important to Intel will be the jqMobi and directCanvas products which give developers environments to build HTML5 applications and to accelerate them on mobile devices. 

Developers that are currently using appMobi's tools will not be effected by the move to Intel except for a one time re-registration to Intel's systems. The HTML5 tools will continue to remain free to use through Intel. 

Ultimately, this will be a smart move for Intel as it tries to validate its presence in the mobile development space. By acquiring a robust set of HTML5 tools it can give developers the option of creating cross-platform apps that will work in any environment on any device and (most importantly) any computer chip. 

Here's appMobi's email to developers on the Intel move, followed by a FAQ also produced by the company:

If you promised yourself you were going to beef up your tech skills in 2013, now is the time to get moving.

But where to start? With so many languages, platforms, protocols and other technologies, it's hard to know what's worth spending your limited free time to learn. Based on surveys and data from a variety of sources, ReadWrite has put together a list of seven of the most sought-after tech skills for this year. 

7. All Things "Cloud" 

The cloud computing craze is still going strong, if tech job hiring trends are any indication. Specifically, companies are looking for software developers who specialize in things like virtualization and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) development, with familiarity with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technologies. 

According to one survey of IT execs, 25% of companies are planning on hiring people with SaaS and related cloud-computing expertise in 2013.  In general, SaaS and virtualization are both buzzwords often cited as being on-the-rise on job search sites. 

Of course, SaaS and PaaS (not to mention whatever-else-as-a-service) can utilize any number of specific programming languages and technologies (more on those below). Suffice it to say that if a given skill helps companies utilize cloud infrastructure or virtualize any aspect of their computing needs, it's in high demand.

See also: Tech Jobs in 2013: Open Source All The Way Down

6. IT Project Management

One of the most sought-after tech job skills isn't all that technical. Slinging code, maintaining infrastructure and designing software are all really important, but they're kind of useless without somebody to see the project through to completion. That's why certified project managers can pull in six figure incomes and why 40% of IT executives are looking to hire project managers in 2013. 

5. JavaScript (And Related Technologies) 

On the Web, JavaScript is what makes things interactive, especially now that the rise of tablets and smartphones has bumped Flash from prominence. Whether it's the ever-popular jQuery framework or the JSON data interchange standard, companies need JavaScript-focused talent like never before. In fact, JSON is the most in-demand skill on CyberCoders.

It's worth noting that when people say "HTML5," they're often referring in part to JavaScript. That's because what makes Web apps look and feel so app-like is CSS and JavaScript, not just the plain HTML itself. 

If you're looking to learn Web programming, JavaScript is the place you want to end up. If you want to start slow, a framework like jQuery could be the way to go. 

4. Java / J2EE

Java and the J2EE development platform are popping up more and more on job hiring boards. Indeed, Java/J2EE developers are going to be in high demand throughout 2013, according to a survey from Dice. 

Unlike hot new technologies like Android development and HTML5, demand for Java skills has been fairly consistent over time, although it has been on the rise in the last few years. 

3. PHP / MySQL

It may lack the sexiness of mobile development or newer Web programming technologies, but PHP is still very important. The open source scripting language runs on more than 20 million websites and powers high-profile sites we deal with every day, including Facebook and Wikipedia. Any blog, news site or other website built using Wordpress or Drupal is making use of PHP as well. It's all over the Web, even if you can't see it by clicking "view source." 

PHP is currently ranked as the most sought-after skill on Elance, with MySQL and Wordpress also cracking the top ten. There are more than a quarter of a million PHP programming gigs listed on Elance alone. 

2. iOS Development

It comes as no surprise that iOS developers are sought after. Most sources that track job talent demand rank iOS development or related skills like Xcode and Objective-C programming very highly. As Apple's sales in both tablets and smartphones has exploded, so too has the demand for developers who can build apps for the iOS ecosystem. 

iPhone and iPad development have been trendy for a few years now, but it's actually accelerated pretty dramatically in the last two years. After years of slow but steady growth, demand for iOS development skyrocketed over the course of 2011 and 2012, according to data from the job aggregator site Indeed. If you've been meaning to try your hand at building apps for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, now is a good time to get into it. 

1. HTML5 / CSS

Where would the Web be without HTML? Nowhere, really. This simple markup language is literally what the Web is made of, with cascading style sheets (CSS) making everything look nice and JavaScript adding interactive functionality. 

It's only natural that the language at the heart of the Web would be in high demand, even as native mobile app development and back-end cloud technologies command bigger ad bigger chunks of IT budgets. In fact, as tablets, smartphones and cloud-hosted services proliferate, the importance of the Web grows along with it. Consumers still need to access their cloud-hosted SaaS services via their Web browser. And studies show that tablet owners still love the Web. 

After years of relative stagnation, HTML has made big advances in recent years with HTML5, which is now supported by the latest versions of all major Web browsers. Meanwhile, the design options available via CSS3 and the interactivity provided by JavaScript have pushed the Web even further, blurring the line between Web-based and native apps. 

HTML5 makes a 23-year-old markup language cool again - and back in high demand. Elance and Indeed both rank HTML as one of their most sought-after job skills, while other studies routinely point to it being in strong demand.

As a bonus, it's relatively easy to learn compared to the other skills on our list.

PHP photo by Robert Agthe.

The enterprise has always been buttoned-down, conservative. And that's a good thing. Let the wacky Web crowd dabble in new-school technologies. Eventually they'll be back, begging for a white paper or two to explain best practices of green screens and mainframes. Right?

Not even close. As Forrester analysts Jeffrey Hammond and Julie Ask highlight in a new report, "The Future Of Mobile Application Development," enterprises must embrace mobile to succeed, with mobile development requiring modern development techniques and technologies like elastic infrastructure, open source and DevOps.  With over one billion smartphones globally, a number that keeps booming, they argue "We’re entering a new age of application development that creates modern, compelling systems of engagement and links them with systems of record and systems of operation."

The problem is keeping pace:

"As companies target more devices and platforms when building modern applications, client-side development costs will increase. At the same time, they will need to deploy releases faster than ever. The only way to survive this Catch-22 is to lower the cost of testing new ideas and make it quicker and cheaper to separate the good ideas from the bad."

Looking For Solutions

Hammond and Ask aren't alone in pointing to this enterprise quandary, even within Forrester. Indeed, the need for flexible development is top of mind across the analyst firm, with analyst Mike Gualtieri arguing that "Traditional application development platforms such as Java and .NET are not necessarily the fastest approaches to develop applications. CIOs should investigate application development productivity platforms that make application development professionals more productive." And faster.

Like what?

In listing out elements of a successful mobile development strategy, Hammond and Ask point to a few essential technologies or technology approaches:

• RESTful APIs that are asynchronous and can be consumed across multiple channels;
• In-memory databases;
• Open-source software...everywhere (lowers barriers to try new approaches);
• Shared SQL databases and NoSQL databases (commodity hardware; scale-out architecture);
• Dynamic languages (e.g., PHP, Django) in concert with static languages like Java and .NET;
• Lightweight process communication frameworks like node.js and nginx (reduces resource consumption, among other things).

Each of the above elements contributes to a much more iterative, agile approach to development. I'd probably also add HTML5, as building native-only applications makes it harder to iterate an application and adds significantly more cost (up to 30%, according to Forrester's analysis). For enterprises who think these things nudge them toward acting more like their Web peers, the answer is "Yes." Just as the Web has gifted innovation like Hadoop to the enterprise so, too, is it paving the way for enhanced mobile development.

Here Comes The Future

It's almost trite to say it, but mobile is the future of computing, whether for the consumer or in the enterprise. As such, enterprises need to emulate the best of modern consumer Web approaches. The alternative, according to Forrester, is not pleasant: "Ignore these structural and business model changes and you risk creating a new generation of stovepiped mobile apps that are hard to maintain and ill-equipped for the changes that are just over the horizon."

Enterprise CIOs needn't panic, though. They have time.  

As Forrester points out, the attributes of successful mobile development they cite are being used by leading mobile app developers, but not perfectly, and still not widely. Mainstream mobile app developers are only just now learning to embrace more of these elements of success, and the enterprise is even slower. Based on Indeed.com's top-10 job trends, however, the enterprise is clearly waking up to these needs, hiring droves of developers with HTML5 and other related mobile experience. 

In sum, they have time, but they need to get moving on emulating Web companies. Now.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Top: Keon Bottom: Peak Mozilla is turning its dreams of a smartphone running its own custom-built mobile operating system into a reality. In conjunction with Geeksphone, Mozilla announced two developer preview mobile devices today, dubbed Peak and Keon. Running Mozilla’s Firefox OS, neither of the phones are much to look at from a hardware perspective and are designed to bring the Web back to the forefront of the mobile ecosystem. 

Keon is a low-range hardware option running a 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor with a 3.5-inch screen, a 1580 mAh battery and a 3-megapixel camera. If that sounds basically like an iPhone 3G, well, it's really close to one from a hardware perspective. 

Peak is slightly more powerful. It runs a 1.2 GHz Snapdragon processor with a 4.3-inch screen, 8-MP back and 2-MP front camera with a 1800 mAh battery. This phone would have been very happy at the top of the smartphone market… in 2011.

Keon and Peak do not need to be powerful devices to serve Mozilla’s purposes. Foremost, these are developer preview phones designed to allow publishers to get a sense of how their Web apps will perform on Firefox OS. Second, and most importantly, the way that Firefox OS is designed means the phones do not need to be incredibly powerful to run the operating system or the apps that go with it.

Beyond Native Apps

Firefox OS is of the Web, for the Web. There is no such thing as a “native” app to Firefox OS. If an object exists as a web page, it can easily be turned into an app for Firefox OS by essentially turning it into a shortcut for the browser-based operating system to access. Instead of having to develop specifically for mobile platforms like iOS, Android or Windows Phone, the Web is the platform for Firefox OS. 

Mozilla’s plan for Firefox OS is to target emerging markets that are not already saturated with smartphones. Hence, do not expect Keon or Peak (or their equivalents when official consumer devices become ready likely later this year) to have a major market presence in the United States. Mozilla’s approach is evident by looking at the schedule for its Fire OS App Days developer tour. The events, designed to get developers building Web apps for Firefox OS, only had one stop in the U.S., in Mountain View on Jan. 19. The rest of the tour takes Firefox OS around the world to places like Bogota, Bangalore, Nairobi, Taipei, and Jakarta, as well as cities like Seoul and Rome. 

Mozilla’s next goals with Firefox OS are two-fold: get more developers on board to flesh out the Web app ecosystem and entice smartphone manufacturers to get on board to build and ship the devices. Those goals go hand in hand with each other as the more apps are built for Firefox OS, the more attractive it looks to manufacturers and vice versa. 

If you are a developer, you can build an app for Firefox OS by making some small changes to your website. You can then test the app by downloading the Aurora Marketplace onto your Android or using the browser-based Firefox OS Simulator. 

Developers – are you going to test out Firefox OS on Keon or Peak? Let us know in the comments. 

When Microsoft gave its first public preview of Windows 8 in 2011, the now-President of Windows Julie Larson-Green sent shockwaves through the Windows development world with just four words: "our new development platform." The reason? That platform was based on HTML5 and Javascript.

To casual observers, that makes sense. HTML5 is roaring to the forefront of development far faster than industry predictions. We even saw some commercial proof of the platform's "Write Once, Run Anywhere" promise in 2012. To seasoned Windows developers, though – particularly those building enterprise apps in dedicated Microsoft shops – it crushed their world. After spending decades learning to use different languages and development environments – most recently Microsoft's proprietary but feature-rich WPF and Silverlight – the thought of jumping ship for HTML5 was devastating.

Microsoft has backpedaled in a number of forums since then, assuring developers that while HTML5 is the new standard for cross-platform apps, other tools will continue to work for Windows-only development. But the writing is on the wall. HTML5 is the future, so if you develop enterprise Windows applications, should you bite the bullet and make the move?

Will HTML5 Save Enterprises Money?

The cost argument will rage for some time. One camp holds that HTML / Javascript developers are cheap and plentiful, so HTML5 is necessarily cheaper. The other side believes that instability of the HTML5 spec (only recently finalized and not scheduled for Recommendation status until 2014) compared to the more mature development environments available for "traditional" Windows development means developers can build complex applications faster, without worrying about tweaking things down the road.

The CTO of one small software vendor saw value in both views: "For our simpler apps, I can hire kids with good Javascript skills and let them learn the Windows specifics on the job. For really complex applications with tens of thousands of lines of code or more, It would be dumb to break what already works." He added that his more experienced Windows developers are mentoring the generally younger HTML developers to cross-pollinate knowledge. "Ultimately, each tool will have a use, for at least the next several years, and I want all of my devs to be able to pick the one that makes sense."

"Serious Coders" vs. "Script Kiddies"

His biggest problem so far is a reluctance to embrace change. "I have a couple 28-year-olds who act like grumpy old men, afraid that the 'script kiddies' without any real computer science knowledge are moving in on their turf. To them, HTML5 cheapens the application, dumbs down their resumes, and opens the door to a whole lot of bad coding from people who know how to make Web pages, but don't have any formal experience with structured coding."

The last point is probably the most valid. Knowing HTML and some Javascript isn't a particularly high bar, so enterprises need to be diligent about hiring and mentoring. If you pull developers off of Craigslist for $15 an hour, you're not going to get quality enterprise work. Even well-established Web developers coming from a LAMP background may not have the right experience. A mentoring program using Agile or another pair-programming methodology – can be a great way to ease Web developers into a more formal programing environment.

What Do Developers Want?

One long-time C++ and (more recently) C# developer wasn't excited about the rise of HTMLt5: "Eh. I get what they're doing. It's all about the portability of UI. They've been on that path for a long time, but whatever. The thing is, developers don't want to learn a new markup when Microsoft has already forced them to learn one recently. WPF / Silverlight is crap, but so was Winforms. If they'd skipped WPF, they'd probably have more success trying to get people to shift to HTML5... I'll go where the money is, though."

That last point is telling. Developers will follow the work, they really don't have a choice. And that it won't be long before everyone will be doing at least some work in HTML5. Smart enterprises will be begin mixing in some of that work now makes sense, but there's not yet good reasons for a complete shift.

It's a good time to be in technology.  According to the December 2012 Dice hiring survey, 64% of hiring managers and recruiters surveyed expect to hire more tech employees in the first six months of the year, versus 47% for non-tech roles.  Life looks even better for tech professionals with open source experience.  

That's because the industry's hottest trends are being driven by open-source software.  Big Data, cloud computing and mobile are all intimately connected to open source.  Hence, it's not surprising that of the top-10 tech skills in demand on Indeed.com, listed in order of how fast these keywords are growing in online job postings, six of them are explicitly open source:

  Used with permission from Indeed.com.

PaaS, which isn't uniformly open source, has prominent open-source offerings like VMware's Cloud Foundry and Red Hat's OpenShift helping drive the market.  Hence, as much as 70% of the hottest job trends can be argued as involving open source.

It's Not Just Open Source

Yes, I know.  There are plenty of proprietary technology companies faring quite well.  Apple, for example.  But let's face it: you're not Apple, and even Apple is facing increased pressure from open-source Android, which now dominates smartphones and looks set to dominate tablets and anything else Apple cares to reinvent.  In mobile, then, you need to know Android as well as HTML5 application frameworks like Ember.js, Sencha, Backbone, jQuery Mobile or others.

In Big Data, demand is high for know-how in a range of open-source projects, as Dice and Wikibon note.  In fact, while we've long had Big Data solutions from brand-name vendors like Informatica and IBM, it's the open-source projects like Hadoop that have really made Big Data a big deal by bringing serious data processing and data storage (predominately NoSQL) to low-cost commodity hardware.

Cloud computing, too, is largely an open-source phenomenon, though the 8,000-pound gorilla known as Amazon is hardly a big open-source contributor.  But that doesn't mean Amazon hasn't benefited from open source: it runs a half million Linux servers (mostly customized Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Xen and other open-source technology.  Much of the other cloud providers, however, rely expressly on open source, including Eucalyptus, Citrix's CloudStack, OpenNebula and OpenStack, among others.  

Training Made Easier

Which leaves us with just one problem: how to get trained on all this great open-source software?  According to the Dice survey, one of the big problems hiring managers have is in finding qualified personnel for all these tech jobs they need to fill:

Which isn't really a problem in open source.  The code is there for anyone to download, learn from and improve upon.  This aspect of open source - the lowering of hurdles to access great code - perhaps more than any other, will do more to increase the pace of innovation in the tech industry over the next decade.  In 2013, our problem is not access to training on the tech that will give us better, higher-paying jobs.  Our problem is choosing where to launch our first GitHub fork.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

At the end of 2011, the mobile industry believed that HTML5 was on the cusp of ubiquity. Everybody would be using it to build apps and mobile websites and we would finally see real operating systems based on HTML5 start creeping towards acceptance. HTML5 was to become the dominant development stack, taking the mantle from all those native apps that had come to dominate the iOS App Store and Android’s Google Play. 

What actually happened is that HTML5 more likely took a step back in developer acceptance in 2012. 

Facebook Goes Native, Apple Cripples Webview

Facebook has long been a proponent of HTML5. The social network’s “native” apps on iOS and Android were actually mobile websites “wrapped” to give native fixtures to the apps for Android and iOS (among other platforms). Yet, Facebook eventually came to find that this system was not optimal for the performance of the apps. Yes, using the m.facebook.com mobile website as a base that could be updated multiple times a day made for efficient development cycles, but in reality the apps were slow and buggy and users often complained that Facebook’s native apps were simply not very good.

Facebook decided to change that in 2012. In August the social network relaunched its iOS app to straight native code, improving its performance. More recently, Facebook redid its Android app as native code in December. 

Facebook and its “hacker culture” is, like it or not, a beacon for mobile developers. If Facebook is going native for performance reasons, then others will follow in the footsteps of a company that serves nearly a billion users, over half of them on mobile. 

Apple has some blame in the blowback against HTML5 in 2012, too. The iPhone maker has limited UIWebView in iOS Safari, causing hybrid and Web apps to perform slowly in comparison with native apps. It behooves Apple to limit the functionality of HTML5 and Web-based apps, as its App Store is one of the primary reasons that people buy iPhones and iPads. Mobile Web apps that circumvent the App Store are, in several ways, dangerous to Apple’s bottom line. 

Hybrid The Name Of The Game

Despite Facebook's move to native apps, more and more developers are incorporating at least a little bit of HTML5 into their apps. For instance, the new LinkedIn app released in 2012 was almost entirely HTML5 and Node.js with only a thin native wrapper that made up about 5% of the code. 

According to the fourth quarter survey of mobile developers by Appcelerator and IDC, about 63% of mobile developers are "very interested" in using HTML5 to build their apps. Many developers are building 50% or more of their apps with HTML5 code. Many apps are including some type of Webview into their apps (for instance, see how social news reader Zite lets you read an article on through the browser or in the app). With the app economy exploding, we now see thousands of apps use the hybrid wrapper model to increase the efficiency of building an app and lower the overall development costs. 

One reason for hybrid development is that it is easier for many companies to find developers who are versed in HTML/CSS than it is to find coders who have the specific knowledge on how to create comprehensive native apps in C, Objective-C etc. By working with HTML5 and wrapping apps, companies (that may not necessarily be tech companies per se) can get more length from their developers and hit more devices in one shot.

Dealing With The Problem Of Hardware

The biggest difference between HTML5 mobile Web apps and native apps are that the native variety have quick an easy access to a smartphone’s hardware features. That means functions as simple as the clock, vibrator, gyroscope, storage, camera and power management are much more difficult to implement in pure HTML5 apps. Developers have dealt with this problem in the past through services like PhoneGap or Brightcove’s App Cloud and wrapping Web apps for native purposes (like Facebook used to do). 

Companies are beginning to crack the hardware puzzle for HTML5 apps. Mozilla is on the forefront with its Firefox OS, expected to be shipped on smartphones sometime in 2013. Mozilla has created what it calls Web APIs that will tie its browser-based HTML5 mobile operating system to hardware components like power management and the camera. Sencha and appMobi are also working on ways to bridge the device APIs. As of yet though, progress in this realm was not as robust in 2012 as many expected.

The Responsive Design Revolution

Responsive design saw a boom in 2012. Responsive design is built from a Web technology stack that includes HTML5 and CSS to create websites that respond to a variety of screen sizes by automatically resizing windows to fit a particular screen. The purpose is to build one set of code for a website that allows it to work on multiple devices without having to build separate sites for individual devices or mobile operating systems. 

For instance, take ReadWrite. This year we launched a new website in October that is fully responsive. Check it out. In this story, make the browser window bigger or smaller and you will see the content respond accordingly. Or try zooming the browser view in or out and note the same thing. The same goes for mobile. Read this article in smartphone and note how it perfectly fits your screen. On a tablet, look at it in both landscape and portrait modes and see how it adapts to each set. 

In conjunction with our responsive design relaunch (and subsequent rebranding from ReadWriteWeb to ReadWrite), we ditched out native apps on iOS and Android apps in favor of the simpler, easier to update mobile Web presence. 

We are not alone. BostonGlobe.com rolled out its responsive design site in 2011 and About.com is now fully responsive. The New York Times has built a responsive site and large companies like Microsoft and Apple use responsive design on aspects of their websites. 

The Leaders Are Changing

In 2011, we said that the game developers of the mobile world were taking the lead in HTML5 development. At the time, that seemed true. Yet, the game makers lost interest in HTML5 as a default platform in 2012. True, companies like appMobi are pushing game makers toward HTML5, but most of the best games of 2012 were built with native code. 

To a certain extent, the leaders in HTML5 adoption are now media companies and news organizations. Those in the business of content are more apt to take a Web-centric view of the world. By doing so, they can avoid the 30% tariff from Apple’s App Store, while still optimizing content towards mobile devices. This trend is not precisely tied to HTML5, but the current evolution of the technology stack makes it much easier for media companies to achieve this objective. 

Facebook was seen as the quintessential leader in HTML5 development in 2012. Yet, with its move to native for iOS and Android, it has ceded that role to the community. As such, open source developers spearheaded by the likes of Mozilla are now the leaders that will drive HTML5 for the foreseeable future. 

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

HTML5 Relevance 

These days any time you talk mobile app development or operating systems, HTML5 is a key part of the conversation.

Perhaps the biggest development for HTML5 in 2012 was its non-development. At the end of 2011, HTML5 seemed like a young athlete that had no limits to its potential. Yet, just as we watch many athletes mature into professional players, the development was marred by maturation and performance issues that took some of the luster off the subject. From a technological standpoint, the HTML5 stack saw good improvement in 2012 as companies like Google, Mozilla, appMobi, Sencha, Research In Motion, Facebook and others have developed towards the stack. HTML5 is well on its way to being a mature technology.

Yet, HTML5 may have suffered a blow to its popularity and perception in 2012. One of HTML5’s biggest proponents was Facebook, which built its “native” apps for iOS, Android and other platforms by taking its Facebook mobile site and “wrapping” it for the native platforms. It was essentially a Web-based approach that lent itself to HTML5 proponents version of the future success of the stack. In the middle of the year, Facebook completely redid its mobile app for iOS, going towards native code and for its iPhone app. Like it or not, Facebook is a big influence among developers and is closely watched for the decisions it makes. When Facebook says it has gone native to increase performance and improve the user interface of its app, people take note. Hence, many HTML5 proponents changed their tune and said that, while HTML5 has its uses, it still is not ready for the primetime. 

Location, Location, Location

The use of location services, social games and maps in smartphones has been something of a useful curiosity in the Mobile Revolution. People may like to use Foursquare and Google Maps on their phones, but ultimately they are just tools to inform you or entertain you. In 2012, location took on a much wider breadth of functionality in the mobile market. 

Location features in smartphones had several interesting storylines in 2012. In the beginning of the year we saw an interesting fad of “ambient location apps” for locating people near you such as Highlight, Glancee and Banjo. This trend moves away from the simple Foursquare-style check-in but ultimately these types of services are more of an edge-case, first-adopter market than anything that will seriously penetrate the mass market. 

Perhaps the biggest story of the year in the mobile location department was the act by Apple to drop Google Maps from its iPhones and iPads in iOS 6. Apple was then roundly criticized for releasing a half-baked product prone to errors. Apple has been working hard to fix those problems and eventually iOS Maps may be a quality product to rival Google Maps. Yet it was very telling that when Google released its own Maps for iOS app in middle December, it immediately became one of the most popular free apps in the App Store. People still like (and trust) Google Maps. 

The seeds for smarter location services in smartphones was planted in several ways in 2012. Companies like Geoloqi out of Portland, Ore. are attempting to create low battery consumption services for background location that application developers and enterprises (like government agencies) can implant into their own services to keep track of employees or the retail shopping habits of consumers. Games are starting to implement location in an alternate/augmented reality layer, such as with Google’s Ingress app or TapCity from Boston-based TapLabs. 

Location will become a much more ubiquitous feature in smartphones and tablets going forward. It may also become less visible as apps and services employ location behind the scenes to learn user patterns and tailor their mobile experience to how users move through the world. The key to that will be to create location services that have lower battery usage while also remaining highly accurate. 

Growing Base Of Developer Services

We noted in the Mobile Trends for 2012 that an app explosion has gripped the mobile industry. Everybody is making an app, in one form or another. 

It was inevitable then that and entire industry would emerge dedicated to the support of app developers. In 2012, we saw the cream rise to the top as some of the services that help developers create apps have cemented their positions in the mobile industry.

From a tools and services standpoints, two big companies have created significant pushes into the mobile services department, with IBM and SAP both offering multi-pronged service features targeted at both consumer app developers and enterprises. Microsoft has made a big push to get developers to use its Azure cloud service as the de facto back end for apps. Adobe, Brightcove and other publically traded companies have made big bets that they can provide much-needed services to app developers and designers. 

Some of the most interesting momentum in the developer services space has come from rapidly growing startups. Analytics companies like Flurry, Localytics, Apsalar, PlayHaven and others are vying to be the default tracking platform for a variety of apps. Tools companies like appMobi, Sencha working to create workable features for mobile HTML5 developers while Appcelerator has cemented itself as a go-to destination for tools and developer support. Several “backend as a service” companies have solidified leads to help developers tie their apps to cloud infrastructure with StackMob, Parse and Kinvey leading the way. The list of developer-focused, service-oriented startups is very long and it is only going to grow as more and more people look to create apps for a variety of platforms and the Web. 

Think of it in the same way you might think of what kinds of mobile apps you may be looking for. If you want recipes, there are hundreds of recipe apps. Shopping? Sure. Communication? Productivity? Maps? Calendars? Yeah, we got all of those. As developers create more and better apps, the services industry will grown underneath it to prop it up. Think of anything that an app developer might need, and there will be a dozen startups and several billion-dollar big boys lining up to provide those services. Marketing, advertising, integrated developer environments, cloud services, user interface and consulting, communications … you name it and a shadow industry that consumers may never see or care about is growing to serve developers.

Hey, wanna Kik me?

No?

Well, I wasn’t aware that Kik had been verbified either - but it's no surprise. The dead-simple messaging app is nothing short of a runaway hit among the text-crazed, sociallysavvy younger set. And with SMS text messaging on the decline for the first time ever, non-SMS alternatives like Kik are soaring. To put that in perspective, over the last few months, Kik has added 100,000 new users - per day. Kik is now 30 million Kiksters strong - with no signs of slowing down.

New Kinds Of Content To Swap

On Thursday, Kik expanded the kind of content users can share on the service. Up till now, the service was just a method of texting without incurring SMS charges. With the update, Kik now lets its massive user base send three new types of content - but that’s just the pilot set. Kik founder Ted Livingston envisions the app as a platform for instantly sharing content - any kind of content - plain and simple.

In a Skype interview, Livingston's casual enthusiasm for his product belied both his precocity (he is 24) and his earnest commitment to maintaining the general, shall we say awesomeness, of his product. “We haven’t really added any user-facing feature since South by Southwest 2011. And the reason why is like, we looked at our app; for us, this is exactly what we want. We want it to be very clean, we want it to be simple, we want it to be this very raw messenger."

Keep It Simple, Kik

Livingston insisted on developing the new release at a snail’s pace to keep from wrecking the service's essential simplicity. The update handles this dilemma cleverly, offering two branching paths: keep using Kik as is, or swipe to the left and access the new feature set.

The new Kik launches with Image Search, YouTube and Sketch, a Draw Something-esque option that lets users swap digital doodles. The app conjures the new content offerings as “Cards,” designed to slide to the fore and be hidden just as easily. Kik’s Cards are built entirely in HTML5 and woven into Kik’s existing native mobile platforms. The result is a surprisingly smooth kind of optional upgrade, so users loyal to text-exclusive Kik can ignore the new stuff altogether.  "If you just want the core experience, it stays exactly the same,” Livingston says. "We watched like a lot of other apps add all these features and try to innovate, just to rip out all the features 18 months later - and sort of alienate their user base along the way. 

Kik’s appeal is easy to see. The messenger is simple by design, accessible on every platform imaginable (even BlackBerry, how kind!) and user handles aren’t linked to a phone number. According to Livingston, Kik is the perfect unifier. While SMS alternatives like iMessage are platform specific (no iOS or OS X? no iMessage), Kik is universal and not linked to anything like an Apple ID. Just pick a handle, hand it out and Kik somebody.

It's All Free - For Now

So far, Kik really isn't all about the Benjamins. With $8 million in funding tucked away, Livingston declines to litter ads throughout the app, and dismisses premium models as arbitrarily holding features hostage to turn a buck. "We make zero dollars of revenue today," says Livingston, who explains that the newly multimedia-rich Cards could also be Kik's ticket to profitability - though that bit hasn't quite been hammered out yet. 

One of the most interesting things about the messaging app, is that Kik has actually crept onto other social platforms. A search for #kik on Instagram yields more than 4 million results, and that’s just the tip of the hashtag iceberg. Hybrid Instagram/Kiksters - most of them teens posing for their front-facing cameras - generously sprinkle tags like #kikme #kikback and even #kikmeimbored into their photo posts, inviting adds on the messaging platform. 

Joining Kik, I thought my 20-something cohort might be better represented among those 30 million users, but Livingston remains my only friend on the app. It'll be interesting to see where Kik's enthusiastic, duck-faced users steer the social chat app next. 

On November 9, 2004, President George W. Bush was still glowing a week after his successful re-election bid and preparing for his second term in the White House. Xbox game Halo 2 had the most successful opening day sales of any video game, topping $125 million. 

And the Mozilla Foundation released the first version of the Firefox browser.

Yes, Firefox turns eight years old today. Begat from the ruins of Netscape and the evolution of the Mozilla Navigator browser, Firefox had a very specific aim: topple the near monopoly of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Beginnings: A Simple Mission

In the beginning, though Mozilla did call its browser "Firefox." The original name (in April 2003) was meant to be Phoenix, but Mozilla ran afoul of Phoenix Technologies, which had a semblance of its own browser at the time. Mozilla then thought it would call the browser "Firebird." but that did not work either, as the Firebird database server already had the name. Firefox was chosen for its similarity to Firebird, but Mozilla then learned that a group in the United Kingdom owned the trademark to Firefox, which delayed the browser's release. Mozilla worked out a licensing agreement and Firefox was born.

What Firefox 1.0 looked like in 2004

Firefox was developed as a branch of the open source Mozilla Suite as a cross-platform browser that would work anywhere. Firefox’s original space within the Suite was known as Navigator - next to other features such as Communicator (Mozilla Mail and Newsgroups), IRC chat (ChatZilla) and a webpage developer (Mozilla Composer). It was developed using XUL markup language, which essentially created the market for browser extensions and themes.

After Firefox 1.0, Mozilla released new versions of the browser about once a year (or so) until 2011, when Mozilla went to the “rapid release” schedule, issuing new versions of Firefox every six weeks or so. Firefox for the Web is now on version 16.2, which was released on Oct. 26, 2012. 

The core goal of Mozilla through Firefox was to create an open source community that gives developers and consumers a choice in how they want to interact with the Web. Firefox continues to meet that goal. 

Firefox was an essential piece in the evolution of the Web. Before there was Google Chrome, before there was iOS Safari, the browser landscape was pretty much Internet Explorer and Firefox. The two diametrically opposed organizations  - a closed system with few choices versus an open system with many choices – have defined, in parallel, the evolution of the Web. 

The Web is a lot different place in 2012 than it was in 2004. Yet that same open/closed dichotomy still defines how the Web evolves.

Firefox In The Mobile Era

Firefox for Android Beta The Mobile Revolution put enormous pressure on organizaions focused specifically on Web browsers. Mozilla looks after many open-source projects, but the bread-and-butter of the non-profit organization has always been Firefox.

As more smartphones reach consumers hands, the less time they spend on the Internet through their PCs and laptops. Smartphones come with default browsers, such as Android’s browser (and Chrome for Android, which will become the default browser for Android in successive releases of the operating system) and Apple’s Mobile Safari. Many other third-party mobile browsers are available (such as Opera and Dolphin) for both iOS and Android, but most smartphone owners stick with the default browser. Unlike the PC world, where installing your preferred browser is one of the first things that people with a new machine, third-party browsers are not yet pervasive on mobile devices. 

That could be because unlike on PCs - where the browser is basically the only way to interact with the Web - the browser is not as central to how mobile users interact with the Internet. Native apps, as found through Apple’s App Store or Android’s Google Play, consume as much time for users as do the default browsers. Whereas I might use Firefox to visit The Huffington Post on my computer, I am more likely to use The Huffington Post app on my tablet or smartphone. 

The native environments inherent to mobile operating systems belie the open principles that Mozilla was founded on. Hence, Firefox finds itself in a position shared by many Web companies in the Mobile Era: evolve or die.

That is easier said than done. Especially if you want to make a significant impact in how people fundamentally interact with the Web through their mobile devices. Third-party mobile browsers are important to the mobile app landscape because they give users choice, but ultimately the likes of Opera, Dolphin, Skyfire or Miren remain niche options for users with specific tastes. 

Sure, Mozilla has released Firefox as a third-party browser for Android. But Mozilla is thinking bigger than just being another third-party browser on some other company’s operating system.

The future of Firefox will be as its own operating system, based on HTML5 and shipped on its own devices. Firefox OS is based on the open source Boot2Gecko project and will be a browser-based mobile operating system built to be optimized towards the Web. ReadWrite has covered Mozilla’s ambitions in mobile extensively in the past. See the stories listed below for context:

• HTML5 Does Have A Mobile Future: Mozilla's Chris Heilmann Goes Mythbusting
• Mozilla Close To Cracking HTML5 Mobile Hardware Integration for Android
• Firefox For Android Reveals The Future Of The Mobile Web
• Mozilla Putting All The Pieces Together To Be A Smartphone Contender
• Mozilla's Plan For Keeping Firefox Relevant In A Post-Browser Web

A look back at eight years of Firefox makes it clear while Mozilla challenges have remained constant, but the context has changed. While Google, Apple and Microsoft try to control the user experience through their (mostly) closed native ecosystems, Mozilla wants to bring the Web back as the central user experience in mobile. The first Firefox OS devices are due to ship sometime in 2013 and will initially be focused on foreign markets, such as Latin America. 

Mozilla is adapting to the evolution of computing, but it remains to be seen if its new plan will be enough to keep Firefox relevant.

Top image: Phoenix version 0.1, Historical browser images courtesy Wikipedia.

2012 may well be remembered as the year when application developers turned against HTML5. Which will be ironic, as HTML5 has evolved more in 2012 than in any other year since it became a reality. But with companies like Facebook dropping HTML5 in favor of native mobile apps, the hype cycle around the standard has turned. Some developers have become disappointed and disillusioned with HTML5. They have come to believe the myths that HTML5 may be, ultimately, untenable.

Chris Heilmann, principle developer evangelist at Mozilla, aims to bust some of the negative myths that have cropped up around HTML5. In a recent blog post, Heilmann gives an impassioned and pragmatic breakdown of the so-called myths surrounding HTML5. He touches on contentious issues of performance, monetization, developer tools and debugging, offline use and capabilities. 

For the most part, Heilmann’s argument is not wrong. His crux is that HTML5 is of the Web and for the Web - and that the Web is everywhere. He leans heavily on the “write once, run everywhere” principle and the problems of “native” apps that are optimized to perform and monetize through a closed application-store model. The HTML5 vs. Native app argument isn't new of course, but Heilmann effectively counters many of today's most popular misconceptions around HTML5 - discoverability, user experience, performance and monetary viability for developers.

This isn't an academic argument. In the long run, the emergence and evolution of HTML5 affects where mobile users get their mobile apps and the perception of how they perform. For the most part, users do not care how their apps were built, as long as they work. But how developers view these choices can change the course of how apps are made, where consumers find them and the tools that app creators choose to use for building for mobile devices. 

Monetization

Pundits like to say that HTML5 app developers are not able to monetize their apps. Heilmann, correctly, disproves this as a general theory. 

“Saying that HTML5 has no monetization model is like saying the Web can not be monetized (which is especially ironic when this is written on news sites that show ads),” Heilmann wrote. 

There is a nasty little secret hidden here that applies to all app developers, mobile or otherwise: Most apps make no money. For every runaway success (Angry Birds et al.) there are probably a thousand apps that languish with few users and/or no hope of making money. Between iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry, there are approximately 1,580,000 (or so) apps - and 80% of them make next to nothing. Only the top 10% considered successful. The Web is a similar landscape. For every Google, there are companies like Microsoft that lose millions every quarter on their online properties. The concept is not that HTML5 cannot be monetized, but rather that it is very difficult to make big money in mobile in general.

Performance & Capabilities

Heilmann contends that HTML5 can perform just as well as native apps, except that closed mobile operating systems do not allow hardware acceleration and integration through the browser to outside apps. This is true - and one reason that Facebook decided to turn away from HTML5.

Fundamentally, the concept of “write once, run everywhere” is easy to achieve in HTML5. It is more difficult to achieve, “write once, perform well everywhere.” HTML5 apps for Web and mobile are often targeted towards a specific platform, such as a certain browser. When those apps are not running on that browser, the performance suffers.

The problem is not a matter of whether or not the HTML5 app can perform, but rather that of user experience. Facebook's HTML5-first vision for mobile meant that the core of its app was built around its mobile m.facebook.com site and then “wrapped” for native stores such as iOS and Android. Many users complained that the Facebook mobile application was nearly unusable on some smartphones, especially for Android users on older devices. 

Mozilla shows off WebAPIs earlier this year

But the onus for HTML5 performance and capabilities really has little to do with the HTML5 development community (presuming a developer’s code is well done, of course) but rather the individual mobile operating systems. It's the operating system and platform providers who need to open up hardware integration and acceleration so that HTML5 developers can tune to them. This lack of cooperation between the OS providers and HTML5 is a key reason that Mozilla is creating its own operating system, the Firefox OS (formerly “Boot2Gecko”) which will be completely Web-based and deployed internationally in 2013. 

As for capabilities, Mozilla is recreating many of the custom features of native apps - such as camera, contacts, calendar etc. - with its WebAPI initiatives, which tie a smartphone browser to hardware features. 

Mozilla Has An Agenda

It is understandable that Heilmann is intense in his support of HTML5. The capabilities of the technology stack mixed with the obstacles it faces create all the ingredients for an impassioned plea.

But Heilmann has an agenda here. Mozilla started in the late 1990s to counteract the Microsoft Internet Explorer monopoly. That battle has now switched to mobile, with HTML5 the primary weapon in Mozilla’s arsenal. So Mozilla has to rally the troops against the closed platforms. The continued existence of Mozilla depends upon an open Web. As the Web goes mobile, the closed nature of operating systems like Apple’s iOS and its App Store threaten Mozilla to its core. 

The fact is that HTML5 is not for everybody. Some developers will gladly take the advantage of the native approach and its closed ecosystem… and laugh all the way to the bank. Then again, native is not for everybody, especially for media brands or large enterprises that cannot or will not invest in the developer resources to create a native app for every platform. 

Will Mobile OS Makers Play Along?

Heilmann makes a significant point in noting how closely the future of HTML5 is tied to the goodwill of the native operating systems. 

“The main reason why HTML5 is not the obvious choice for developers now is the above mentioned lockout when it comes to hardware. An iOS device does not allow different browser engines and does not allow HTML5 to access the camera, the address book, vibration, the phone or text messaging. In other words, everything that makes a mobile device interesting for developers and very necessary functionality for Apps,” Heilmann wrote. 

There is no certainty that the native platforms will move an inch to support pure HTML5 apps (unwrapped for native performance) outside of their own purposes. For Apple specifically, there is little incentive to do so. That's why it makes sense for companies like Mozilla to take its future into its own hands with projects like Firefox OS. Yet there is no guarantee that Firefox smartphones will sell well - and it is impossible to monetize without attracting eyeballs.

When it comes to mobile users, the goal is for none of this to matter. If I want use Firefox OS or HTML5 apps, I need to trust that those apps will work as well as the native versions I am already used to from the closed app store models. Consumers should not even have to know if an app is native or HTML5 Web-based at all. The goal is to trust that any app, no matter how it is made, will work well on your device. With the complex relationship between the mobile operating systems, native app creation and the Web, there is no guarantee of that right now. 

That has to change. Outside of the specific Mobile Web App vs. Native App argument and the uncertainties it creates, there is a growing place in app development for HTML5 in the near and long term. The biggest problem – user experience – is conquerable. It will just take more cooperation among the various players to achieve.

Top image from HexGL racer by Thibaut Despoulain.

Out Of Beta & Into Adobe's Edge Suite

Today, Adobe introduced PhoneGap’s latest iteration in an announcement at the first stop of its international Create the Web tour. PhoneGap is part of the company's new Edge tools and services suite. Developers that are members of Adobe’s Creative Cloud program can access its latest features. Specifically, Adobe released PhoneGap Build, a service that compiles HTML5 code in the cloud before deploying it to the native app stores. PhoneGap Build has been in an open beta period since the fall of 2010. Today, it is publically available to all developers. 

“This is exciting because what Adobe is doing for Web technologies and HTML5 will define how the mobile Web will grow in the next few years," said Al Hilwa, program director for application development and software at research firm IDC, in an email. "The mobile device revolution has been huge for consumers, but supporting each mobile ecosystem is a chore that developers at both enterprises and software firms have to work hard to bring their apps to all the major platforms.” 

Adobe's acquisition of Nitobi, publisher of PhoneGap, has not affected the product's core capabilities. The team continues to release new features and updates on a weekly basis. It continues to engage with the open source community and build a free product with paid features, for developers to deploy their HTML5 apps to the Apple App Store, Google Play, Windows Phone Marketplace and BlackBerry App World. PhoneGap is still agile and useful. 

PhoneGap, which is technically known as Apache Cordova, remains an open source project. According to an Adobe press release, companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Nokia and Hewlett-Packard have contributed to the project. PhoneGap has been downloaded over a million times and there are 400,000 developers registered to the service. PhoneGap Build has compiled 200,000 apps for the native app stores to date. 

The big news is that PhoneGap Build is finally available to the general public and comes with a new pricing plan. Developers can either become full Adobe Creative Cloud members for $49.99 a month or choose an al a carte option just for PhoneGap Build for $9.99 month. A free option still remains, though it allows only 100 app builds (compilations) a month as opposed to the paid version’s 1,000 per month. 

Developers who keep up with each successive PhoneGap update will not find much different with the new product. PhoneGap Build has a faster debugging and build cycle, called Hydration, and it lets developers test apps directly by pushing the code base to test devices. The PhoneGap interface has also been updated with the goal of improving workflow. 

PhoneGap’s Place In The Development Landscape

PhoneGap was one of the first “wrapper” services for mobile developers, but other companies rushed to create cloud compilation services for HTML5 apps. Companies like Brightcove, Conduit, appMobi and others also offer compilation services that have matched or exceeded PhoneGap’s original products. A Brightcove executive told me not long ago that its App Cloud service was like “a next-generation PhoneGap” with enhancements and features not found in Nitobi’s original product. Adobe is trying to address the notion that PhoneGap has fallen behind the competitors by releasing App Cloud to the public. 

PhoneGap is just one service in Adobe’s new push to be the go-to platform for Web and mobile app development. After shutting down Flash for mobile devices, Adobe has thrown its full weight behind HTML5 and Web development tools like CSS and Javascript.

“The mobile Web offers an important path forward for developers and designers that want to leverage their work productively across the different devices. There is no one doing more than Adobe in advancing the mobile Web and the bunch of tools released today into Adobe’s Creative Cloud show that the company’s transformation is making great strides,” Hilwa said. 

PhoneGap, despite being in limbo on Adobe’s product shelf for the last year, will now benefit from being part of the larger suite of tools that the company offers. On its own, Nitobi would have had trouble competing on a feature-by-feature basis with companies like Brightcove. With Adobe behind PhoneGap, the service is now part of a much more comprehensive, competitive whole.