It’s not news that more and more people are bringing their own phones to the work places. There’s even an acronym for it, BYOD, bring your own device. We have written about the risk of employee devices brought into and used in the workplace.
According to a recent GigaOm article, the practice of BYOD is not going away no matter what Boston Area Tech Support providers might have to say about it.
Mobile apps for specific smartphone platforms continue to sell well, but the app economy could be influenced by the sale of HTML5-capable phones. Research firm Strategy Analytics predicts sales of one billion HTML5 phones in 2013, compared to an estimated 336 million this year. While the most popular smartphone — Apple’s iPhone — is a top seller, it pales in comparison to this figure.
A big chunk of mobile apps today for the Apple iOS and Google Android are partially built with web standards such as HTML5: the code used to power many websites today. More often than not the HTML5 code is used for presentation in a mobile app, it’s look, but then it’s wrapped together by a platform’s native operating system code. This approach allows the application to access low-level device-specific functionality such as the camera, storage memory or GPS radio as examples.
As HTML5 gains functionality, and an overall larger userbase, could today’s native apps simply be a stepping stone to pure HTML5 software in the future? The device-neutral platform may be the best way to code one mobile app and have it run across tens of millions of devices across various mobile operating systems: Windows Phone, iOS, Android and others.
The prediction of more than one billion phones in use by 2013 is a big one. As providers of Networking Support in the Boston area we’ll be looking to see if it rings true.
To read more of the GigaOm article, just click here.
