One of the delights of watching the Net is looking at how folks are using this fascinating medium. And unless youve been hiding under a rock, you know about the importance of mobile applications. Not only that, but you are probably being told you have to think about developing your own app as a business or author.
Heres some food for thought.
There is a difference between how people use an iphone and how they use a tablet such as an ipad. The iphone is a truly mobile device that works best on geographically related information. While an ipad is mobile it isnt what you carry around in your pocket to pull up fast directions or information/reviews etc.
The iphone works best when you tie information to a location. The ipad works best as an entertainment or information device that delivers rich or interactive information.
What this means is that a wholesale nursery or hard goods supplier may find it useful to identify their retail partners on a mapping part of the app along with plant or product information. Tell gardeners about the plants and then tell them where to buy them. Deliver shopping information along with plant, design and use information tied to the retail location.
But if youre a publisher without location-sensitive information, then creating a book as an iphone app may not be the best use of your resources. Creating an ipad app is the way to go or simply producing rich ebooks that can be consumed on any of the devices is likely the optimum route for individual writers.
What about making websites and blogs mobile friendly? Understand that most iphone users do not type out urls and deliberately visit your site. They do arrive via a search and mostly to single pages. This means if you check how a single page looks on your blog/site and its fine then putting a great deal of effort towards the navigation system may not pay dividends at this time. WordPress users can simply use one of the available plugins to turn their theme to a mobile one.
This leads us to the inevitable question about making money from the app. Dont hold your breath would be my advice on this one. The big guys can write it off as marketing but the issue is how an individual author makes money. There is software being introduced to the market right now that will allow subscriber-based information to be developed. As well as some pretty interesting software that turns words and images into funky ipad applications. But those things are not yet mainstream.
Like a lot of things, the state of the art in software is “coming” to our individual author level and while it is available to enterprise-level publishers for large investments, a few months will level the playing field.
This of course begs an entirely different kind of question about marketing and sales but for the moment, it’s enough to decide what kind of platform you want to work with location based or content-based.
Like a lot of things, one size does not fit all as the market develops. Where do you want to be?
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