Native mobile apps and enterprise apps

I want to comment on and link a couple of recent articles and industry trends. First of all the news that iPhone owners have downloaded 300 million copies of apps from the App Store, and 100 million in the last six weeks. That’s just an incredible figure. It certainly puts the kibosh on the theory that everything is moving to the mobile web. The iPhone is the world’s best mobile browser, and yet users clearly want native, local apps on their device. And the logic of having a local application is magnified even more in the enterprise application scenario where access to offline data is so critical (this is not really a consideration for most consumer apps).

The second article discusses approaches to delivering CRM application functionality via mobile devices. The article quotes executives from SalesForce, Oracle and SugarCRM on their plans to make their software available via wireless devices. There was a spectrum of answers ranging from emphasizing just the mobile web to advocating a hybrid approach. One quote that I liked from David Trice at Oracle:

We see a hybrid approach as offering significant user value. Critical features that are commonly accessed by users must be always available through the use of native applications. Supporting information and additional capabilities can be offered through browsers.

Now the problem I have is that as open source advocates, we of course use SugarCRM to run our business. Right now SugarCRM’s native mobile solution is a third party proprietary one called MobileEdge from iEnterprises. I like MobileEdge but its only available for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile (and won’t run on my HTC Fuze) and the functionality is a bit minimalist. In contrast our SugarCRM sample app runs on every mobile device (four operating systems today and on Android in 1.0) and we didn’t have to do much to make that happen (we wrote the app once). Will native mobile apps be able to keep up with platform diversity (aka fragmentation) without a solution like Rhomobile?