I attended Velocity last week and there was a strong focus throughout the conference showing that mobile apps and websites are taking over and in the future desktop web browsers are going to become the niche whilst a mobile web experience will be the norm.
Despite my comments, I and many other have said in the past without stats, that not everyone needs a desktop which tbh is fairly obvious, but this isn't about the device, I got a phone after so long simply to 'embrace' it and see if it made a difference in my life. It is to do with the apps and the drive for it, just because something is popular doesn't mean it is automatically something that needs to be 'embraced', however if it is a market then research is required and what I don't get isn't individual apps, its when and where a person would use and so far it often seems to be a case of procrastination.
There were also some comparisons of other industries that had been resistant to change such as print publishers who had failed to embrace eBooks and also the big one Blockbuster who failed to see the threat coming from Netflix.
This is completely different, we aren't talking about how the internet changed businesses or how publishers stuck (and still stick) to paper. I made this thread because researching apps failed, if you look on the internet about how apps have changed the world etc, majority of the articles happily start with positive comments like "It allows us to access information", "a new way to communicate" and "made our life easier", but then starts talking about games and social networking instead of explaining itself, seriously do a search and you will see what I am talking about, it describes the internet and somehow allows mobile apps to take the credit :S. Not only that several sites criticise mobile web and recommend mobile apps, in a sense a replacement to the internet and these arguments are similar to language wars too so that doesn't really make me anymore comfortable with apps. The internet however, it talks about information, digital storage, research, working with web APIs for education purposes, so far mobile devices have become the electronic device that people get if they have no use for a desktop, there wasn't any new doors opened for me by getting a smartphone, this isn't about embracing it is about finding a use for myself.
Let me try to get my point across a different way and in a sort of device way too, Google glass, I don't get it? Surely you aren't going to try to say I should embrace making apps for that too are you? I can imagine it being popular and full of apps but is that enough to make me want to invest time in it. As for the corporate argument, if a company wanted me to make an app, consider it done, I would never allow my personal opinions to affect my work, that doesn't mean I will use the app myself, even if it brought in millions in revenue, perhaps the reasons I don't have use for the apps is because I don't have enough free time in my life or all the tasks in my life are created statically or that I don't like games anymore, but I am not going to start conditioning myself to like apps simply because they are popular especially when most of the time they are used to waste time.
