Does ‘the App’ have a long term future? I’m not so sure. Right now, Apps are definitely in, after Apple’s successful App Store launch in July, 2008 – the world has gone App mad and justifiably so. The Apple mantra “There’s an App for that” certainly fits with every conceivable (and in some cases inconceivable) variant available; the App store is a regular eco-system of little one shot applications that will do everything for you, from monitor your sleep cycles to let you race cars. They are so ‘in’ that not long after the launch of the App store and its rapid success, incumbent players like Nokia and Blackberry where quick to announce App Store-like launches of their own. And the other new upstart – Google’s Android – jumped into the fray with a App store all of their own too.

There can be little argument that the iPhone has become the digital Swiss army-knife for urban dweller and with the recent announcement of the iPad, along with reports that the new Apple SDK development kit (which now includes iPad development tools) has spiked in downloads; we can probably expect a host of new iPad apps to follow suit. The other players also have not been standing still, Nokia is having some moderate success with their Ovi Store, the Blackberry App World store is up and running, and of course the Android marketplace is in play. The App as a software paradigm for a brave new world of mobile devices looks strong and healthy; but I would add that it looks strong and healthy, for now.

There is a question on the economics of the App and how consumers could be shifted across to making micro-purchases for something that is in fact web-based

The advent of CSS3 & HTML5 provide a very interesting landscape that may well topple the installed local App as the dominate player. Why? These latest W3C Internet technologies provide a build once and deploy anywhere methodology that is presently missing form the established App architecture. An Apple App will only live on an Apple device, same story for a Nokia App, for any of the other players, Google, Blackberry, Windows or Palm. In contrast, a Web App like a web page is device agnostic, as long as their is a browser on the device – you can see it, play with it, use it. This means I can build my application once and deploy and offer it to anyone regardless of the type of mobile device they own.

These new web technologies also move the curve of what you can do with a Web Application a lot closer towards the traditional installed App feature set, which means a large number of App types could well be built as Web Apps and in some case they would be better as such. The new HTML5 standard offers the ability to do things like offline access, localised database support and geo-location pinpointing that traditionally were the dominion of the localised installed App. In tandem, CSS3 vastly improves the styling control that designer has over a webpage’s elements and visual display.

There is a question on the economics of the App and how consumers could be shifted across to making micro-purchases for something that is in fact web-based. It is going to be an interesting space to watch over the coming months – Apps are in no danger right now and HTML5 and CSS3 will have at least a 18-24 month adoption cycle so we won’t be seeing any potential impact from them on the current form of the App at least until late 2011 – still it will be fun to see how it plays out.