The future of the web has been the topic of much debate since Forrester CEO George Colony predicted the end of the web and an era of the ‘app internet’ in his talk at Le Web earlier this month.  Fred Wilson, Mark Suster and others came out in defence of the web, but it seems to me that the commentary has been largely one sided.  Perhaps that is unsurprising given that as VCs and bloggers most of us have benefited hugely in the past from the open web and stand to continue to benefit into the future.

However, even though the open web is better, it won’t necessarily prevail.  In a great post last September Joe Hewitt set out why.

Firstly, at the most basic level the web is just a collection of protocols and languages.  It has no unique characteristics that assure it a permanent place in our information architectures:

The HTML, CSS, and JavaScript triumvirate are just another platform, like Windows and Android and iOS

Secondly, there are plausible non-web visions of the future:

I can easily see a world in which Web usage falls to insignificant levels compared to Android, iOS, and Windows …. The Web will be just another app that you use when you want to find some information, like Wikipedia, but it will no longer be your primary window. The Web will no longer be the place for social networks, games, forums, photo sharing, music players, video players, word processors, calendaring, or anything interactive. Newspapers and blogs will be replaced by Facebook and Twitter and you will access them only through native apps. HTTP will live on as the data backbone used by native applications, but it will no longer serve those applications through HTML.

An alternative non-open web vision of the future is one in which access to services is controlled by an oligopoly consisting of Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook.

I don’t come with any solutions, but rather with a request that we all remain open to a full consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of the open web, and of alternative models – there can be no sacred cows.  That way we will have a better chance of preserving what is really important – and that is open and even access to content and distribution for consumers, and by extension for startups.

For the Android doubters amongst you (and I know there are many) the reasons for Apple to be worried were summarised by Henry Blodget yesterday on his Business Insider blog:

1. Samsung has now overtaken Apple to become the biggest single smartphone vendor (28m units sold in q3 vs 17m iPhones)
2. Samsung and Motorola are very close to the iPhone in terms of design and performance
3. Android now rivals iOS as a platform for developers, and will become more important if Android continues to grow faster than iOS

In summary – Android has now reached a scale where its network effects match that of Apple’s, and unless Apple does something remarkable it won’t be long before it slips into a clear overall second place.  Blodget describes how that will work:

the better Android phones get, and the more market share Android gains, the more Android’s network effects will increase, and the more Apple’s leverage over the iPhone ecosystem will diminish. And that can only be bad news for Apple’s ability to continue to command exploding profits from iPhones, app developers, musicians, media companies, and others who now must pay it big distribution fees because they have no other choice.

…..

As the history of the tech industry has demonstrated again and again, technology platform markets tend to standardize around a single dominant platform. Although several different platforms can co-exist while a market is developing, eventually a clear leader emerges. And as it does, the leader’s power and "network effects" grow, while the leverage of the smaller platforms diminishes.

For additional colour I recommend reading Confessions of an iPhone user who recently switched to Android.

Blodget also shows how the arguments that Apple fans have made against Android have one by one been overturned by events:

Initially, the argument was that Android phones sucked compared to the iPhone, which was at least a year or more ahead

Then, when Android phones improved and the gap closed, Apple fans pointed out that  that the iOS platform was was still much bigger than Android and therefore much better for developers

Then, when Android became the smartphone market-share leader, Apple fans pointed out that Android phones were made by several different manufacturers and that Apple was still the biggest smartphone maker and that the App Store was still the best platform for developers

And so on…

This speaks volumes to me.

Despite all of the above, I don’t think the battle is over yet.  Apple could come out with another killer device, or development of the Android code base might falter, but it seems to me that the multi-party Android ecosystem is now both stronger and more resilient and Apple/iOS.

Regular readers will know that I’m more of an Android than an Apple fan and Job’s resignation doesn’t change that, but I am full of admiration for what he has achieved.

For me the best proxy for smartphone market share is mobile ad impressions.  This metric captures internet usage of the devices which makes it the best indicator of where the mobile computing market is headed.  By focusing on internet usage it filters out low end Android handsets that are little more than feature phones and people who have smartphones because they are cool to own, but don’t use them as mobile compute devices.  My thesis is that this fashion brigade will quickly shift to the next new shiny phone when it emerges.  The trouble with looking at ad impressions is that it ignores some app activity, but all round I see it as the best metric to use.

And on an ad impression basis focused on smartphones only Android is running at a 54% market share, with iOS a distant second at 26% (courtesy of mobilemix and Digital Trends):

Using the more traditional metric of OS market share by devices sold Android is again out in front.  Gartner has them at 43% (table below) with the fast declining Symbian still holding second place ahead of iOS.  Canalys paints a similar picture with Android at a 48% market share and iOS taking the second place slot from Symbian last quarter at 19%.  All parties agree that the smartphone market continues to grow very fast and that within it Android is growing the fastest (i.e. gaining share).

The best Android phones still don’t match the iPhone (and as I said on Friday my next phone will again be an iPhone), but with the scale advantages Android now enjoys I think it will only be a matter of time before their phones are the best.

On the tablet front Android only has a 20% market share and is still some way behind Apple who has just about all of the remaining 80% (as per ABI Research), but this market is much newer and it was only 6-9 months ago that the first mass market Android tablets hit the stores.

Following that I forwarded Fred’s post to Jof Arnold of Fitfu because he and I had lunch yesterday and because we have a long running Android vs Apple debate going.  His reply, and the email exchange which followed led me to morph the post to this one, which is more of a general musing on native apps vs HTML 5, Android vs iOS, and app stores vs open web distribution.

So here is what I’m thinking on native apps vs HTML 5 (be warned, this conclusion to the apps vs HTML5 debate is almost becoming a cliche):

• Consumers don’t care whether it is HTML5 or native, for them it is all about functionality and discoverability
• Better HTML5 apps are coming all the time
• But there will always be things you can do in native apps that are difficult or impossible in HTML5 (currently that includes good access to the device’s video, camera and audio)
• So we will live in a hybrid world where developers use HTML5 when they can and native apps when they want to push the envelope – e.g. in games
• But as HTML5 grows in power it will take an increasing percentage of apps
• An increasing number of developers will write apps in HTML5 and then use native code wrappers for packaging and higher features (credit Jof)

The points so far have mostly addressed the question ‘what platform is easiest from a development perspective’.  Equally, if not more, important of course is ‘what platform will give me the best distribution’, which takes us to app stores vs open web and Android vs iOS debates. 

At this point I need to declare a bias.  As regular readers will know I’m pro the open web and have a dislike of Apple’s closed system, and in particular the way they control which apps are allowed into their app store and onto their devices in order to advance their own services, particularly iTunes.

With that out of the way, here is my thinking:

• The Android platform is still inferior from a user experience perspective but it has two advantages over iOS that I think will make it the winner in the long run:
  1. Cost – it gets on many more devices because it is free (current lawsuits notwithstanding….).  More devices will mean more users, with the twin benefits of improving the underlying OS and attracting more apps.
  2. Open-ness – being able to deploy native code to the device without approval from a third party will become more important as mobiles and tablets become general purpose computing devices
• Open-ness won’t be as important if consumers remain happy getting apps from an app store – my belief is that as search gets better and HTML5 gets better the restrictions that come with an app store will start to outweigh the benefits, with the 30% house tax being a particularly significant issue.  However, I may be wrong about this, the counter argument that people are getting trained to go to app stores and won’t change may be the right one.  I don’t think so though – the history of the web tells me that once search is good enough people prefer it browsing on portals.

The final caveats to my conclusion that Android and non-app-store distribution will win are that Apple’s advantages in terms of user experience and app store volumes mean that it is still out in front at the moment and, as Jof pointed out in his final email, it is often the better business rather than the better technology that wins, and right now Apple is the best business out there (and to my mild annoyance I’m going to get an iPhone5 next month because the Android phones still aren’t as good).

Hat tip to Strategy Eye for the graphic and original article.

Let me explain.

Firstly the concept of a walled garden has mostly been applied to the web offerings of AOL and mobile operators which gave consumers access to only a limited portion of the web.  Carefully curated, but limited.  That sort of walled garden has emphatically lost. 

What we have instead is a more subtle form of control – rather than the sites we can visit the control is over our identity, over updates of the software on our devices and over the services we can use.  The Techcrunch article points out the following:

• every phone has a unique ID that is regularly uploaded to the servers of our app providers
• Amazon can arbitrarily delete books from our Kindles
• consumers don’t take responsibility for managing their own security on smartphones which means the control necessary to do so has passed to Google, Apple and mobile carriers

Not mentioned in the article is the fact that the most open of mobile OS’s Android comes with a cast iron requirement to use Google Maps and Google Search.  Finally, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that you can only run Apple approved software on your iPad and iPhone.

Last summer I wrote a couple of blog posts about how the web ecosystem is maturing and getting more complicated making it harder for startups to grow to scale without working in partnership with companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple.  I think that is doubly true on mobile where not only is it hard to scale without partnerships a startup remains dependent on its partners for continued prosperity even after it has hit scale.

In many ways I would prefer it if the web and mobile web were as open and free as they used to be, largely because that made it easier for startups, but as I wrote above the news that the ecosystem is to an extent controlled by the large players isn’t all bad.  With the control comes and ease of use which has massively accelerated usage growth, particularly on the mobile web.