Next Generation Wireless Applications: Creating Mobile Applications in a Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 World, 2nd Edition

4.1 POSSIBLE APPLICATION PARADIGMS FOR MOBILE SERVICES

Identifying what exactly constitutes a mobile application is increasingly difficult to say. Could it be defined as anything that runs on a mobile device? This definition isn't ideal because pages that run ‘in’ browsers don't really run ‘on’ a mobile device. Also, many of the service enablers, as discussed in the Chapter 3, don't run on mobile devices at all. How about any application that is accessible from a mobile device? Is this a good enough definition? This brings us back to the browser and accessing websites not designed with mobile in mind. Do these count as mobile apps? This is probably where I draw the line for his book. Here, I'm mostly interested in applications that are clearly intended for mobile – ‘designed for mobile’. Given what we said earlier about the importance of a compelling end-user experience, this is really only possible by intending to design a service to exploit fully the technologies and potentials of mobile devices and their supporting ecosystem.

As Figure 4.1 shows, we have our roaming mobile user who wants a useful service (granted, they might not know what they want) and we have our service provider (in the general sense¹) who wants to provide a useful service? What, as the question mark is indicating, do we build in the middle to marry the intentions of these two parties? The first line of enquiry is to consider the essential nature of mobile services; so that we have an idea of what it is we ...