Consumers love their smart phones, but corporate users can be a little less enamoured with the mobile version of their business apps. But some – if not all – of the the restrictions that have frustrated you in the past could shortly disappear, as FSN writer Lesley Meall explains.
Opposable thumbs have brought the human race a long way. They haven’t done quite so much for the other animals with some kind of opposable thumb or toe (such as apes, koalas, and certain types of frog), so it will be interesting to see how well they serve the Android mascot. The Xperia (Android phone) from Sony Ericsson is the first smart phone to incorporate a (slide out) PlayStation certified game controller, which effectively gives the mascot opposable thumbs.
Right now, you are probably wondering why I’m telling you this. Well, there are a number of reasons. To start with, I want to point you in the direction of the videos in the Xperia ad campaign, and urge you to watch them. I’m not on a retainer from Android or Google or Sony Ericsson (in case you were wondering), but the first of these ads, 'Android is ready to play' is just so wonderfully weird that I feel compelled to share it – and as follow-ups go, 'The Donor' isn’t bad either.
Anyway, once you’ve had your brief dose of ‘creepy’, I can move on to the other reasons – such as the PlayStation-style buttons being great news for fans of Tekken (I jest). This is actually peripheral to the point I was really hoping to emphasise (at the risk of stating the obvious), which is, that the mobile phone is no longer just a mobile phone. It has not yet evolved into the flexible, solar powered, nanotechnology-exploiting and morphing communication device that the Nokia Research Centre is predicting (see here), but it is well on the way.
Which brings me to the main reason why I suggest you take a peek at the surgically enhanced Android mascot in action: because it demonstrates just how much our expectations have changed (of advertising campaigns, software applications, and mobile devices). They’re not called smart phones for nothing. The mobile user experience has become so immediate, intuitive, and innovative for consumers, that we are frustrated and disappointed when we encounter anything less impressive as corporate users – even if we are used to being ‘underwhelmed’ by business software.
It may not feel like it, when you are frustrated by the limitations of the mobile version of the business software you use, but developers are well aware of their shortcomings, and they are taking steps to make their apps more intuitive and user-friendly. Some of them are even trying to learn from social networking sites and games developers, by making their business software more of a ‘joy’ for people (and their opposable thumbs) to use, as FSN highlighted in a previous article here. But in the same way as some business applications are more intuitive, user-friendly and feature-rich than others, so are the smart phone versions of them.
At the moment, there are some very good reasons for this, technically, as Gary Turner, UK managing director of the online accounting provider Xero explains. ‘Usability can be a challenge. You need to focus on the most important data and interactions, and pay attention to details in the software, such as drop down menus, and these all have to be modified,’ he says, adding, ‘and this can be a bit tricky.’ So most business systems (be they accounting and ERP, BI, or any other fully-featured and sizeable app) offer just a cut down version for use on smart phones, which works better in some scenarios than others.
Where a BI app is concerned for example, providing access only to a snapshot of your data or the system actually fits rather well with the ethos of the product. So if you have been monitoring dozens and dozens of KPIs (as the senior partner of one accountancy firm recently showed me on a rather sizeable printout), then being forced to be a little bit more selective could actually play in your favour. For many of those who want to use their smart phone to tap into apps and data on the corporate network, the main issue isn’t how much information they can access, but how easily they can tailor the mobile feed to meet their needs.
This is reflected in the latest offerings from software developers. The reporting app for the Agresso Business World ERP, for example, provides smart phone access to any information the user would normally have access to. ‘Unlike other reporting apps which are often pre-defined and restricted to a set of hand-coded reports,’ says Anwen Robinson, UK managing director for Unit4, ‘Agresso’s reporting app allows dynamic querying of any information without extra configuration.’ Users can create their own library of reports and populate them by dragging and dropping columns.
But it is worth noting that this reporting app has been developed for use on Apple’s iPhone and iPad – no mention of Andoid phones – which highlights the device compatibility and resourcing issues that have (until very, very recently) created some sizeable hurdles for software developers that wanted to provide smart phone (and iPad) access to their systems. Developing an app that can exploit the capabilities and strengths of each individual smart phone (or other mobile device), or even each operating system platform, is no small undertaking. As Turner observes: ‘They all need to be maintained,’ whether you op for thin client or thick/rich client apps.
Historically, many business software providers (of on-demand and on-premise systems) have avoided the hurdle of needing to develop multiple versions of the mobile variant of their apps by offering mobile access via a web browser. Theoretically, this means that one single application will work on any browser, and it can be used from any device with browser access, whether it’s an Android phone, BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows 7 – or whatever (even if you do get access to just a cut down version of the app). But it’s an approach that largely benefits those developing and publishing apps, rather than those using them.
It provides developers with direct control over the apps distribution and it’s cheaper and faster to maintain that a series of native apps – not least because skilled web developers are far more plentiful (and therefore cheaper) than those skilled in native programming languages such as the iPhone’s Objective-C. But the web-browser approach means that developers can’t exploit the device-specific functions of each smart phone, and it restricts what users can be offered to the ‘lowest common denominator’ functions that are standard on all platforms.
At this point it seems sensible to digress a little, and clarify some of the issues relating to ‘web apps for mobiles’ and ‘native mobile apps’. I don’t want to get too bogged down by the semantics or blind anybody with science (myself included), but it’s worth going into this, so bear with me. Strictly speaking, a native app is one that has been developed for a specific device and/or operating system; so a ‘native’ app developed for the iPhone will need to run on its proprietary iOS platform, likewise Android phones, and Symbian for many Nokia devices, and so forth – as do many of the apps that come pre-installed on your phone.
The big advantage of native apps is that they can (theoretically) exploit anything the device offers: audio input, image capture and camera and video inputs, touch and motion sensors, the compass and other geo-location aids, plus (and it’s an increasingly big one) the entire and ever-expanding ecosystem surrounding the device. But this brings us back to where we were earlier (and where business software developers have been stuck for some time), with the need to write and maintain code for lots of different versions of what is essentially one single app – with all of the complexities and resource issues this creates. Fortunately, this is no longer the (seemingly) insurmountable hurdle it once was, thanks to the latest and greatest version of HTML.
In theory, there is no reason why HTML5 will not kick-off a revolution for users and developers of business smart-phone apps. By using HTML5 (and the new and complementary technologies that will accompany it) to build apps, developers will be able to keep the mobile versions of their business apps web-based but still provide a ‘native’ experience – something some developers (such as SugarCRM) have already done, and others (such as Xero) are in the process of doing.
Without getting to bogged down in the details, it will enable software developers to create web apps that look and feel native, even if they are not (which they won’t be). Simply explained, HTML5 will enable web apps to survey each target device and operating system, recognize its capabilities, and download features that take advantage of those capabilities. It won’t solve all of the problems with all mobile versions of all applications, and exploiting it wont be a resource or cost free option for developers, but it will make it much easier for them to make the mobile experience as impressive for corporate users as it is for consumers.
We’ll have to wait and see which software developers exploit this, of course, and to what extent. But if you want the developer of the business apps you use to make the leap, you may need to bring this to their attention. ‘Fifty per cent of the system enhancements we make are based on users wishes,’ reports Stuart Lynn, who heads up the Research and Development (engineering) department for mid-market division of Sage, UK. Quite how you go about conveying those wishes, I don’t know, but if you’re struggling for ideas, I do have a suggestion: you could send your request along with the links for the Xperia ads and a reminder that you know where they work.
