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According to MobiThinking.com, there are currently 5.3 billion mobile phones in use worldwide. 90% of them have Internet access, and 25% are “smartphones” with enough computing capacity to run their own operating system. Surprisingly for some, however, less than 5% are Apple iPhones. This means that despite all the buzz, iPhone Apps are accessible by only 1 in 20 mobile consumers, and only 1 in 4 can access smartphone mobile apps of any kind. Smartphone or not, on the other hand, “W3C mobileOK” pages and apps are accessible by 9 out of 10 mobile consumers.

 

As Miami web design firm developer Bruce Arnold observed, “Big companies with big budgets can afford to spend big bucks developing redundant mobile apps for Android OS, Apple OS, Blackberry OS, HP Web OS and so on. But why should they? The principal beneficiaries of platform-specific mobile apps development – which tend to lock users into the platform vendors’ offerings – are the programmers and producers of the operating systems and devices they run on. Using XHTML/CSS or HTML5/CSS3 and standard web development tools like PHP coupled with a cross-platform mobile DDR (device description repository), most if not all of their functionality can be delivered by a single browser-based Mobile Web app. And if it is coded in compliance with the W3C’s ‘keep it simple, keep it small’ mobileOK standards, that single Mobile Web page or app will work not only on all smart phones but also on the vast majority of cell phones that aren’t so smart. That means businesses won’t have to ask customers to buy SmartPhone A or SmartPhone B if they want access to Sales Portal X or Tracking Resource Y. It also means reaching a much larger market for a much lower cost.”