e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Smartphones

  • Blackboard Mobile Learn: More on Web vs. Native Development

    Update: Literally a minute after I published this, Scott Wilson tweeted about this Slideshare presentation about the relative advantages of web-native development for smartphones.

    Thanks to George Kroner for this link to data on student mobile phone usage at University of Edinburgh. Now, this is just one data point, so we have to be careful not to overgeneralize. However, what strikes me about the survey, in addition to the high usage of smart phones in general, is how different the market share numbers are from the U.S. In this survey, Nokia has a full 25% of smartphone market share—substantially more than RIM has. Nokia’s smartphones run Symbian, an operating system that barely registers in the U.S. in terms of market share. It would appear that smartphone market share can be highly variable across different markets.

    This may be one reason why the growth in mobile touch-friendly web sites is far outstripping the growth in native mobile apps:

    Source: Taptu via GigaOm

    Even within the United States, smartphone market share has been highly volatile. Consider this graph from The New York Times:

    Source: The New York Times

    We tend to forget that, just three years ago, Palm was at the top of the U.S. smartphone market and Apple didn’t have a smartphone. Given that Palm has just been purchased by HP, Microsoft is coming out with a ground-up rewrite of their mobile operating system, and Android is gaining traction fast, making a bet that you know which phones are going to be hot three years from now and developing a separate native app for each of them can be a risky and expensive proposition.

    This is part of what makes the Blackboard vs. Moodle dueling mobile strategies interesting. Blackboard has chosen the more expensive native app approach and is charging extra for the capability (a decision that Ray Henderson felt a need to justify in his recent blog post). Moodle has several different approaches being developed by various parties, but the one most closely associated with the Moodle community management is web-native and (of course, given that it’s open source) free. In terms of mobile functionality, we have no real evidence that one platform is leading the other, although I suspect that they will remain close to comparable for the short to medium term.

    I have no doubt that Blackboard will make some Mobile Learn sales in the short term (although, given that they don’t break out their sales in their earnings reports anymore, we’ll have no way to know how many Mobile Learn versus Mobile Central sales they make, or how many mobile sales they make in the aggregate). The question is how much pressure will they come under how quickly from their customer base to bundle this capability for free as their competitor does. And will their native app approach yield them a competitive edge that enables them to continue to charge, or will it turn out to be a financial millstone around their necks as they are forced to continue the higher-cost development strategy to provide a free application?

  • Moodle Mobile Now Developing an Android Native Client

    Well, I guess it’s mLearning Week here at e-Literate. Just a day after I noted that the main difference we are aware of between the Moodle mobile clients and the forthcoming Blackboard Mobile Learn client is that Blackboard plans to have native apps for Android and Blackberry, the Moodle folks announce progress on a native Android app. Let the arms race begin!

    Update: I have just been informed by a member of the Moodle mobile development team that both the iPhone app and the Android app are, in fact, web apps and not platform-native apps. That wasn’t obvious to me at all on casual viewing (especially with the iPhone, where I have no first-hand experience and didn’t recognize the browser chrome). It will be interesting to see how much of a difference that makes in terms of user experience, particularly with Google and Apple both pushing HTML 5.  Anyway, the mobile web app has been tested for Android, but is not Android-native.

    By the way, the helpful people at Blackboard’s P.R. firm referred me to this study at Ball State University showing that, as of about six months ago, 38.5% of their students own smart phones, and 18% (or roughly half of the students with smart phones) owned iPhones. No word on the Blackberry/Android breakdown, which probably has changed in the past six months anyway due to the new Android phones on the market. I am quite sure that there is a lot of variability from school to school, based on demographic, socio-economic, and geographic factors.

    There’s actually some interesting mobile work being done by University of Cape Town in South Africa, but it focuses on text messages rather than whizzy smart phone apps. (I strongly suspect that UCT has a lower percentage of smart phone users with unlimited data plans than Ball State does.) I’m looking into the possibility of getting a guest post on this topic at some point. (That’s a hint, Stephen.)