informational, utilitarian apps for consumers: “infotility?”

I was pleased to see today’s article in Mobile Enterprise Magazine on open source for mobility. It was great to see Rhomobile recognized again as the leader in smartphone app frameworks for the enterprise. This includes apps such as Aeroprise’s mobile BMC Remedy and OpenHealth’s mobile SugarCRM.

But we’re seeing a lot of the projects that enterprises exposes to consumers. These include claims apps for three different insurance companies that should all be hitting the market soon (I won’t steal their thunder by announcing them now). Consumers can use them to manage claims and other aspects of their vehicle or healthcare insurance right from their device. We’re also still happy by the Wikipedia app and its status in the top 100 public apps on the AppStore.

I met with Michael King of Gartner yesterday. He made the point that these apps were not “outliers”. The value that the Rhodes framework has that doesn’t exist in other frameworks (synchronized data, a Model View Controller paradigm, support for all devices, Ruby on the device and a hosted development environment), also apply to consumer apps. But the common thread is that the apps must be of a certain complexity and focus on data in order to necessitate most of these features (well certainly synced data, MVC and Ruby). Or you need it to go beyond two or three smartphone device operating systems.

If it’s a simple consumer “branding app” of a page or two, and its just for a couple platforms (iPhone and Android) its likely that either a small Objective-C app (rewritten for the other device) might suffice. Or you can write it in some other HTML framework such as PhoneGap since you don’t truly need the power of Rhodes sync or MVC or Ruby or multiple devices.

But for a wide swath of consumer apps you do care about hitting every available smartphone, you want a bigger hammer than just HTML and Javascript (such as Ruby on the device) and you want a more maintainable approach such as MVC for larger apps. Furthermore, though most App Store apps don’t use sync, the ones that do get a lot of differentiation in the sea of copycat apps that are appearing up there. For example, the claims apps qualify, location finder (of whatever: coffeeshops, restaurants, points of interest) apps qualify, anything where the user’s enter information (reviews, ratings, and pictures for annotation) qualify. How to describe these information oriented, utilitarian more complex apps for consumers.

How about “infotility?”. There was a category on feature phones called “infotainment” a few years ago. Infotilities are larger (more than one page), richer in capabilities (exploit what the modern smartphone can do, often sync or cache data and are often bidirectional.

So… thanks Michael. We’ll be sure not to ignore these consumer developers as you suggest. And let us know what the right category phrase is.

0 Comments | Posted by adam