A survey commissioned by dotMobi, the people who are trying to push the world to register URLs that end in .mobi so that users know that a specific site is going to work properly on their mobile phone, has found that the amount of mobile websites has increased from 150,000 in 2008 to 3.01 million in 2010. The firm also analyzed the top 500,000 websites as ranked by Alexa and discovered that of the the top 1,000 sites on the internet, 40.1% have a mobile version. That percentage drops to 29.7% when you increase the sample size to the top 10,000 sites, and falls even further down to 19.3% if you look at all 500,000 sites.
“As more tools come to market and HTML5 support spreads, mobile Web apps will displace most ‘native’ apps. Brands can now build a single mobile Web presence that works across all mobile devices without the limitations, costs and maintenance issues of multiple app platforms. The mobile Web lets you address all of your mobile customers, not just those with iPhones and Android handsets.” – dotMobi’s Director of Engineering, Ronan Cremin.
I’m finding this to be more and more true when I look at my personal mobile phone usage. I never install more than 5 applications when getting a new device, instead opting for a list of bookmarks that take me to mobile versions of the sites I already visit on my desktop computer. At IntoMobile we’re a little guilty of slacking when it comes to building a mobile version of our website. It’s on the roadmap, but our ninjas are busy working behind the scenes on other things that I can’t yet mention.
What’s your smartphone usage like? Are you living in applications, switching between them constantly to find just the right information you want, or are you old school and just live in the browser? With the latest versions of iOS and Android, the browser is absolutely superb, so why would you want to use something else?
[Image via dotMobi’s Flickr page]