The question of whether or not mobile apps are here to stay is highly steeped in the future of the mobile market, with lots of attention being given to their growing economy, ability to interface directly with consumers, and demand for cloud-based services that trickle all the way down to the end user. But the rise of smartphones began with something different in mind–apps have become a stepping stone towards mobile browsing, dipped in personalization and out to optimize the mobile experience. So can mobile apps win out over mobile browsing, or are they a fad, as widgets once were for the personalized web?

One area we can already observe is mobile shopping, which is expected to gain speed in the coming weeks as we approach the holiday season. A couple of studies this week, one from Orange and another from Lightspeed Research, indicate mobile shopping activity beginning to shift away from apps and towards mobile browsing in the US and Europe.

Of the 3,905 respondents from Lightspeed’s study, 54% preferred using mobile browsers to shop online rather than apps, which came close at 41%. There’s not a grave difference here, and depending on the furthered development of mobile apps and browsers, these stats could totter in one direction or another.

When it comes to shopping, there are a number of other factors to consider, such as consumer comfort levels around mobile retail, integrated payment options, etc. But there’s been a huge effort towards the improvement of mobile browsing as of late, and that would introduce a high level of familiarity for users, rather than the continued adoption of mobile apps as points of consumer interaction.

Firefox knows the importance of a seamless web-to-mobile experience, as it’s been testing sync options for Android’s version of Firefox 4. It’s also something Google is banking on, with a number of integration points between Android’s mobile experience and its Chrome browser. Adobe is hedging its bets with things like Flash support for mobile browsers as well as mobile apps, directly empowering the developer community on both fronts.

In an extremely diverse app market, the unification of the mobile experience through browsers is an inevitable one. It’s also a major opportunity for leading OS providers to drive their stakes into mobile territory, which could be extremely important for Microsoft as it prepares to unleash Windows Phone 7 into the mobile OS market. Microsoft seems especially concerned with preserving the consumer experience, and is willing to be a controlling factor as its app market rolls out.

Mobile apps, however, aren’t going anywhere soon. They’ve become necessary software installs making sense of our consumer mobile industry, developing an economy all its own. They’re ability to specialize a certain experience on mobile devices is a concept already being applied to electronics outside of the mobile arena, making their way to television sets, navigation systems and kids toys. They will, effectually, help us digitize our physical world in ways we have yet to imagine.

But mobile apps will also need to develop more mechanisms for communicating with each other, across platforms and devices. This is where encompassing and agnostic platforms come into play, be them game platforms or advertising networks. Mobile browsing will become an interfacing tool that reorganizes our interactions with our apps, retaining the mobile-specific aspects of content gathering and delivery (GPS tracking, hyperlocal ad delivery, etc.), but will become even more relevant to the end user.