Back in 2005-06 the world had almost come to working with browser apps only. This was after we had started giving up on Yahoo chat as a desktop downloadable tool. Soon after mobile started picking up and WAP sites got popular. Later in 2007-08 iPhones were launched and all hell broke loose. Web developers now had to develop for environments that were different from the traditional web. Nokia’s symbian was still popular in developing economies. And then Android also caught up.
As if all the fragmentation wasn’t enough, browsers like Opera and UC web were running their own standards of HTML and no-JS sites. Google Chrome was lagging in mobile web story due to low bandwidth in developing economies so they started re-directing traffic through Google Web Light. They recently introduced AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) as a standard for content sites on low bandwidth. In a bid to reduce bandwidth overload for extended usage some developers took to Single Page Applications (SPAs) as well but that had it’s own challenge in terms of first time load and SEO.
With the whole fight around apps/no-apps, Google is now introducing app streaming for users with high-bandwidth access. So what does a developer do?
We tried to do a break down of all potential interfaces. Here’s what we got. Might be useful to think around this.
Web interface break down for India. (Click to expand)