Mobile Only is the new Mobile First

more than three-quarters of Pinterest’s traffic now comes from mobile

Searchers on smartphones experience many speed bumps that can slow them down. For example, any time they need to change context from a web page to an app, or vice versa, users are likely to encounter redirects, pop-up dialogs, and extra swipes and taps. Wouldn't it be cool if you could give your users the choice of viewing your content either on the website or via your app, both straight from Google's search results?

CEO Mark Zuckerberg today noted during the company’s earnings call that 48 percent of users on a given day are only accessing it from mobile. That comes as nearly half — 49 percent — of the company’s advertising revenues, its key revenue driver, now come from mobile ads.

When you consider Facebook users consume Web content inside a web view within the Facebook app, then Facebook is the second popular Web browser on iOS and Android. ... the embedded experience might be the most common way to experience the web on smartphones.

For now, though, the social network should be proud that it’s surviving the shift to mobile that many thought would be its demise. The company swallowed its pride, admitted it had made mistakes designing for desktop first and building apps on HTML5, and righted the course. Now it’s not only surviving, but thriving on mobile. With 41% of ad revenue coming from small screens and more than 3/4ths of daily users in it homeland visiting via phones and tablets, Facebook’s “mobile-first” strategy seems to be a success.

HTML5 is a head-fake. Due to the design complexity outlined above, many developers attempt to short-cut the system by blending elements of the desktop or mobile web world into their applications (or will argue to simply wrap HTML in a container and call that a mobile app). This is a dangerous decision where the developer is optimizing for themselves and not the user. You should never optimize developer convenience over user experience.

Welcome to the world of “mobile-first” design, in which apps are primarily and uniquely tailored to the mobile medium, versus being shrunken-down versions of Web apps. ... Wroblewski predicts that mobile will become even more important in the next few years, fueled partly by a rising tide of users for whom mobile devices are the only access to the Internet—aka “mobile-only” users. Also, as the Internet of Everything gathers steam, he says companies will increasingly have to think about their customer in a multi-device ecosystem. In that world, he says, mobile will likely still be front and center, but interoperability will be key and cross-device use cases—where content, people and services flow seamlessly between smartphones, tablets, connected TVs and more—will be the norm.

People tend to lump smartphones and tablets together as “mobile”. This can be misleading. Ask people who run internet companies and they’ll tell you that user behavior on tablets is far more similar to user behavior on desktops/laptops than it is to user behavior on smartphones. That said, the software on smartphones and tablets is similar, as are the discovery mechanisms (mostly app stores) and monetization techniques. ... App stores have had a few important effects: 1) They take 30% of revenue, which scares away most big companies (e.g. Microsoft) and also startups/venture capitalists. Not many businesses can survive an immediate 30% haircut. 2) They’ve led consumers to expect very low prices for software. It’s hard to imagine charging $30 let alone hundreds of dollars for software through app stores (although some mega-hit games do get near these levels with in-app purchases). This is why many big software vendors are scared. 3) The discovery mechanisms (e.g. top download charts) tend to have a rich-get-richer effect, making it very hard for software to grow from niches, as they often did in the past. Just as in the movie industry, the trend is toward creating blockbusters that appeal to everyone. The emergence of new app discovery mechanisms (e.g. FB & Twitter) might alleviate this problem.

The number of mobile web users is already at 1.5 billion, which happens to be quite close to the total number of Internet users back in 2009. And it is growing rapidly. In 2015 there will be an estimated 2 billion smartphone users which is quite close to the total number of Internet users currently.

The scale that served us so well in building and delivering the leading social gaming service on the Web is now making it hard to successfully lead across mobile and multiplatform, which is where social games are going to be played.

These numbers are already large enough to require attention — and they're not going down. With sales of PCs at an all-time low, more and more people will rely on their smartphones and tablets to go online. For this growing population, if your content doesn't exist on the mobile screen, it doesn't exist at all. Now's the time to figure out how to meet their needs. ... Meeting the needs of the mobile-only user also doesn't mean sending them to the desktop website on their smartphone. Asking mobile-only users to pinch and zoom their way through a website designed for a monitor five times larger is an ergonomic nightmare — and a cop-out. We can do better for these users than tiny fonts, untappable links, and broken hover states.

Rose stated: "We talk about 'mobile first' in 2012, but we want to be 'mobile best' in 2013. We want to create some mobile experiences that simply can't be done on the desktop.

He says that WhatsApp is not likely to be making a desktop version of its service any time soon. “We get that question asked a lot,” Koum said of desktop apps. “We feel strongly that the world is moving to mobile and [so] we want to be mobile-only. Your phone is with you all the time, and desktop is to many becoming a secondary experience. [So] our answer is no, not anytime soon.”