Personally, I wish I wasn’t asked to write anything about Android. I tend to be more interested in technology the consumer is actually waiting for, rather than announcements that are simply hyped by this huge corporation. But I’ve been surprised by Google a couple of times. First, Chrome on Windows. Next, Chrome on Android. I can summarize my surprise as follows, “Google, Apple work towards mobile content platform homogeneity!” Now, we have something to blog about.

In the very fragmented mobile space the amount of development platforms that developers are recruited to use has always been a problem. There are enough mobile operating systems and mobile device models to keep a small army of developers busy with simply porting code for one device to another. Having been involved in those types of projects, I can say that the porting ends up being a very large part of the cost of the whole production. –end rant–

Let me clarify my observation. The iPhone web applications that we have developed run as good on Chrome as they do on the Safari iPhone browser. Both browsers use the WebKit browser engine. And, both Chrome and iPhone Safari can provide solid ways to bring important features to these web apps. For example: off-line browsing, AJAX, and rich media. If you look back at mobile technologies over the past eight years you won’t find this “accidental” agreement between phone platforms happened very often.

To repeat myself, I’m not someone that’s anticipating HTC’s Dream T-Mobile announcement. In fact, I’m almost more interested in when the next Android based phone is launched after the Dream. As a company that mobilizes and monetizes mobile content, we like to see real numbers on consumer adoption – not predictions. As far as we can tell, we’ll be waiting on adoption of Android by consumers for a while.

So how important is Chrome on Android? I believe it is very significant to see a next generation web application capability which is similar on all new and popular mobile devices. It is important both for the successful distribution of content to a wide audience and for the development of a powerful advertising channel to monetize that content. Google … Ads … Anyone?

Crisp Wireless has created SDK based downloadable applications and web applications for a long time and we believe the content publishers who work with us, have seen much more benefit and revenue out of web applications than the downloadable applications. Google gets that. It is no wonder they look to build on top of the iPhone’s success rather than to fragment the mobile internet.

Xavier Facon | RSS 2.0 | Comment it , or trackback this post.