Mobile in the West

A while back, I wrote about how many Asian companies are going “mobile only” and dropping their websites altogether. The primary reasons for that were more people accessed the Net via their phones than PC’s and low broadband speeds.

Now Ben Evans gives several reasons why the “mobile only” approach makes sense even for many Western companies! He starts by referring to the old computer science saying that “a computer should never ask you a question that it should be able to work out the answer to”. And guess what?

“A smartphone knows much more than a PC did…It can see who your friends are, where you spend your time, what photos you've taken, whether you're walking or running and what your credit card is.”

And so:

“The sensors, APIs and data that are available (with permission - mostly) to a service you want to use on a smartphone are vastly greater than for a website isolated within a web browser on a PC. Each of those sensors and APIs creates a new business, or many new businesses, that could not exist on a PC.”

But, in a different blog, Evans warns that the mobile/app approach wouldn’t necessarily work for everyone. The litmus test question for a company to decide whether to go the app way at all is:

“Do you have the kind of relationship, and proposition, that people will want to engage with it enough to put your icon on their phone?”

And even if a company goes the website route, they should make that site mobile friendly. Why?

“(Because) that of course is where links from Google and Facebook will take people.”

After all, Google and Facebook would themselves be used on the phone!

Either way, website or app or both, Evans recommends that:

“You should presume that your customers will engage with you only on mobile... So your mobile proposition should not start from thinking 'what would people want when they're mobile?’, but rather on 'this customer may only see us on mobile, so how do we shape our proposition to reflect that?”