HTML5 vs. Native Apps – digital media companies leading the charge back to the browser
Wednesday, August 10th, 2011
In the last couple of days, two notable digital media services released HTML5 applications optimized for iPad that provide a native app-like experience while bypassing Apple’s app store.
Yesterday, VUDU launched a browser-based, streaming video service, optimized for iPad. Today, Amazon launched Kindle Cloud Drive, enabling customers to buy, download and read Kindle books, also through an HTML5, browser-based experience.
There are already plenty of good reviews of these apps (see here and here), and I won’t re-hash all of the ground that has been covered. The two things that most impressed me about the Kindle app are:
1.) The buying experience is great – although the store is missing a couple of key features (e.g., personalized recommendations), I found browsing and buying through this app better than on Amazon’s website and far better than the store on Kindle
2.) You can download and store books for offline reading – even though it is a browser-based application. This is one of the really nice benefits of HTML5 and makes browser-based applications feasible (and closer to parity with native apps)
It’s not at all surprising Amazon or VUDU launched these services. The iPad is primarily an entertainment device, and it’s a platform these companies need to be on. But the economic model fundamentally doesn’t work for services like Amazon and VUDU if they sell content through the app store and have to pay Apple’s 30% cut.
I can already stream MP3s from Amazon’s Cloud Player to my iPad. I suspect it won’t be long before the Amazon MP3 team delivers its own iPad-optimized, HTML5 integrated store and player that delivers an iTunes-like experience. And I bet Amazon Instant Video isn’t far behind. I think we’ll see its iPad-optimized HTML5 app right around when Amazon’s Android tablet launches, which will undoubtedly have a native Instant Video application.
It’s fun to see some signs of early momentum on the iPad/HTML5 front, and it’s not at all surprising that digital media services are leading the charge. Unlike the iOS game companies, whose content COGS is $0, digital media services like Amazon and VUDU have to pay publishers/studios/labels for the content. So HTML5 is really the only viable long-term approach to build a business on the iOS platform.
In short order, I expect we’ll see a host of other digital media services executing the HTML5 strategy for iOS. Is this a sign of things to come for other app categories on iPad/iPhone?
