The role and importance of mobile software is increasing rapidly in virtually all application domains, ranging from entertainment to mobile banking for consumers and from mobile email to accepting credit card payments in the field for businesses. Despite its potential, mobile applications and services have not experienced the broad adoption across society that is warranted by the potential that they offer. The key inhibitor holding back adoption is the fragmentation of mobile platforms and the limited success of mobile run-times. The fragmentation causes any company interested in providing a mobile application for a large audience to develop a significant number of versions to cover the most popular handsets. For a variety of commercial and strategic reasons, the fragmentation of mobile platforms is still increasing.

Although mobile web applications have long suffered from a severely constrained user experience, mobile browsers are increasingly close to reaching parity with their PC counterparts and new solutions are appearing that allow mobile browser applications to use the features available on the device, such as GPS, network access, etc. while minimizing the risk for the user. Hence, it seems increasingly likely that for a large class of mobile applications, the mobile browser will evolve as the standard mobile platform.

The article below discusses the alternatives that can be considered when building mobile applications, as well as their advantages and disadvantages.

1. •Jilles van Gurp, Anssi Karhinen, Jan Bosch, Mobile Service Oriented Architectures, Proceedings of the 6th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS 2006), Bologna, Italy, June 14-16, 2006, LNCS 4025 Springer 2006, ISBN 3-540-35126-4. pp. 1-15.