Google just announced that they optimized AdSense for Mobile for smartphones. You can now use standard AdSense formats to target smartphones or “high-end” phones like the iPhone and Android. Both standard text and image ads will be available for display on mobile apps.
This is of course great news for all developers looking to generate revenue from advertising or marketers looking to target mobile devices as part of their usual campaigns with AdSense. The program is still in “beta” mode and more information is available here.
Here’s the demo / announcement video from Google’s Laren Usui:
With all the hype and popularity around mobile (native) apps across smartphones and their respective app stores it’s important to remember that the web browser capabilities on most of these smartphones is quite robust and a lot of the mobile native apps out there can be achieved as a mobile web app as well.
For example let’s take a look at the Webkit browser which is being used on the iPhone, Android, and S60-based phones. It allows for mobile web apps to take advantage of the following capabilities:
Advanced Javascript and AJAX
Complex animations and graphics support (CSS3 + Canvas)
Embed and use a local database
Multi-touch navigation
Linking to phone and mapping capabilities
and more
What does this mean? With these browser capabilities the user experience seen in most native apps can be equally brought forth as a web apps - of course 3D immersive games are not included. Also, as browsers evolve and adopt other W3C standards such as the GeoLocation API, the gap becomes narrower between their native relatives. Furthermore, as smartphones get shipped with these robust mobile web browsers, the web applications can support a wide variety of devices. This is currently not the case with native applications when dealing with cross-devices
Of course, there is an obvious benefit to mobile native apps over mobile web apps - App Stores. App stores can help companies and brands easily distribute (and monetize) their application(s). Looking to how the (desktop) web exploded and is currently being monetized - I am sure similar paths will be taken.
A great example is the latest version of GMail for mobile web browsers. Google introduced a new version of GMail for mobile web browsers at the GSMA Mobile World Congress. It exposes a lot of the rich capabilities on smartphone (iPhone and Android only for now) web browsers and allows for GMail to be used offline much like a native app. Below is a demo of it (priovided by iPhone Buzz).
Is it just me, or are all new mobile phones being released these days all look + feel exactly like the Apple iPhone? By coincidence they all seem to have very similar feature-sets as well and they all claim that they have just come up with an innovative new product. Are they really to blame? Apple may have just created the perfect mobile phone. For example, take a look at the new Palm Pre and the LG Arena KM900 that are releasing soon.
As if making their phones look and feel like the iPhone wasn’t enough, they’re also knocking off Apple’s monetizing approach with their App Store. Here’s a a list of all the App Stores announced post-iPhone:
Apple’s competitors really need to work at innovating and not just ripping off their product and strategy. At least if you do so, please do not pretend that you’ve come up with something revolutionary.