Direct Marketing & Digital Marketing Agency - Ashley Bolser Agency

Since our first foray into mobile app development in 2008 with Symbian & the Nokia connectors application, we’ve seen a massive increase in projects and clients interested in developing their own applications. We’ve got some really interesting apps we’ve been developing recently for all types of handsets with vastly different functions inc. image recognition, API, GPS & geo-location, for some big clients - all very exciting!

And since the iPhone, there has been an incredible explosion on the iTunes app store, Nokia’s Ovi store is becoming a big player,  Vodafone are jumping on the bandwagon and lots of other network providers and third parties have emerging app stores. However, this rapid adoption has lead me to ask some questions -

• How long is the app rush going to last?
• What is the future of mobile apps?
• Where are we headed?
• Is this really the business/mobile model of the future?

Mobile apps and their stores have been great for leveraging the recent shift from mobile phones to mobile computing, and really signaling the future  of digital technology - but they do have some inherent problems-

• Publishers rely on third party platforms
• Publishing and approval process
• A needle in a haystack
• Dedicated application and API development an added cost
• No one technology really pervasive over all the mobile platforms
• Costly development and update cycles

What do they give us?

• Reduced data requirements
• Better integration of phone hardware - GPS, Camera
• Embedded interfaces
• UI ‘Bling’
• Monetisation of content/service

However, comparing mobile apps with it’s bigger brother, the desktop, we can do all this in a web browser today without the need to develop unique apps for different computers etc. Google already have there own suite of apps, Microsoft are moving the office suite into the browser. With the great leaps in browser technology (xHTML, CSS3, HTML5, jScript libraries) we’ve seen photo editing, multi-track audio recording, video editing and lots of previously installable applications all move to the browser without any OS dependency.  We are even going to see the OS move to the browser when Google Chrome OS is released.

And this is where mobile apps will end up - in the browser. 4g networks, wi-max and demise of data-charges will allow us to move back to HTML technology and allow publishers/developers to build once and deploy across all device and ultimately gain back control. That’s not to say that Bolser are going to stop developing mobile apps, but we won’t be taking our eye of the bigger picture either.

And yes, the web will win! In fact it already has.

I often get asked how to guarantee deliverability on the many email campaigns we work on. Unfortunately there are no guarantees to hit every inbox 100% of the time, but you can make sure that you give it the best chance. We have rigorous testing for all email campaigns and follow best practices in our own designs. Some examples of these are:

• Correct balance of text over imagery
• Call to action in the preview pane
• Rendering tests for online and offline email clients
• Testing against spam filters
• Live tests on our own email accounts and clients
• Subject line testing

But even then you can’t always guarantee it will reach the user. One example of this is an email newsletter I receive from www.returnpath.net, a company specialising in email monitoring and deliverability. Ironically, this email always goes into my junkbox time and time again.

I’ve never marked it as ‘not junk’ just to see if it ever lands in my inbox correctly without my intervention.