The mobile industry is commerce in motion, undergoing a tumultuous revolution of technology and economy.  In the midst of patent lawsuits, antitrust investigations and platform launches is a patch of green, popping up markets around the promise of mobile, and giving the industry’s players something to fight for.  There’s no telling who the ultimate winners will be, but the strongest platform will be able to provide the most prosperous ecosystem to support numerous sub-markets.  And as the mobile market matures, the very familiar web experience of the PC days becomes more important for consumers and businesses alike.

There’s the growing support for HTML5, which levels the playing field for mobile browsers.  And the Android platform is seeing an uprising of third party markets selling specialized software for supporting mobile devices.  The app store itself seems to lose relevance as app developers and publishers hone their focus in on the consumer, mapping several routes of access to link their services to end user activity.  Mobile apps and their app stores simply can’t address all the needs of the many industries flocking to their pastures.  But mobile platforms still play an important role in perpetrating the transition to a better web-based experience on connected devices, attracting the right players and partners to keep that platform flush.

For many, that means an improved mobile browsing experience, building a presence in other app stores and finding new ways to reach the end user.  The app store is currently the most prevalent segue between app publisher and end user, but it won’t last forever.  At least not in its current state.  It simply won’t be needed.  The app store is a repository for service-specific software that’s designed to do a limited number of things.  And while this has its benefits in certain services, like media streaming or personal cloud access, there’s little interaction that mobile app has with the rest of the world.  The app itself is an isolated service that inherently limits itself given current platform offerings from iOS, Android and all the others.

Mobile apps are like widgets 2.0

Apps themselves are mere stepping stones to the true potential of an interactive mobile web experience.  And the app store, especially on iOS, is a regulated gateway demanding compliance from publishers and a toll from consumers.  In many ways, mobile apps remind me of widgets during the dawn of web 2.0.  Remember those? They were handfuls of HTML that transcended walled-off websites, enabling a new form of content sharing for personal or social purposes.  Who still has their Google homepage? Anyone?

I asked Clearspring CEO Hooman Radfar what he thought of the current mobile app market, considering his company used to be a large proponent of the early widget movement.  Now with a focus on content sharing and marketing metrics around consumer web behavior, Radfar’s preparing to take over the mobile world as well.  And for his publisher clients, the mobile browser is central to their needs.  “To those that think apps are the future, I say note really…the browser really is the app,” he says.  “People don’t want to have everything relegated from one store.”

For a website publisher, an app may be useful but it’s sharing capabilities are relatively isolated, and require additional setup for capturing that data.  It’s easier to share content on an Android device, as your content interaction is centralized around the “menu” button, pulling up all your options from supporting services and apps.  For Radfar, it’s first things first.  “Over time our focus will be the analytics and tools to manage it.  Users still don’t understand how to use everything.  It benefits publishers to put the sharing tool right on the mobile web page.”

Mobile apps and browsers would love to talk to each other

But as other industries try to find their niche in the mobile realm, the mobile browser just doesn’t cut it.  As a regular Springpad user I often got frustrated with the iPad browser’s limitations in sharing web content–I had no easy way to save something to a Springpad notebook and manage my actions around it.  It’s just one of the many shortcomings of the iOS Safari browser in its efforts to create a unified user experience.  So I was thrilled when Springpad rolled out an update that lets you add a Springpad folder to your Safari Bookmarks, as well as a homescreen “widget” that pulls up the “Add something” function for quick and direct access of Springpad’s core features.  It’s a creative workaround that speaks to Springpad’s determination in offering consumers a practical use case for their product, straddling this era of transition between app and browser.

“People are going to want to access what they want to access, be it on the app or web, says Springpad CEO Jeff Janer.  “But people don’t want to necessarily go through the app and access the web that way.

“I think it’s going to be a long time before the app store declines, or everything shifts to HTML5,” says Springpad CEO Jeff Janer.  “That being said, what we launched last week is a parity to Android–the quick-add button on the home screen acts like a widget and will immediately take you to “Add something” for iOS.”

Janer hints at one strength of Android’s platform, and finds a way to make it work for iOS.  For Springpad, it’s important to create a useful presence across all the major platforms, but Janer also recognizes the rising challenges in increasing visibility in a very crowded app store.  Simply determining which category to be listed under can shift consumer access and response to your mobile app.  And maintaining a good reputation in a consumer-centric marketplace presents another challenge, where ratings and comments matter.  Springpad is looking to other app stores to ensure its access and visibility in as many places as possible, hedging its bets as the mobile ecosystem develops a taste for niche “shopping outlets.”

App stores for app makers

While shifting consumer demand gives rise to specialized app stores and search engines, the app makers must also determine where they fit in.  Appcelerator sees an opportunity in creating a marketplace just for them.  Launching an Open Marketplace for developers, Appcelerator now has a central community of buyers and sellers, swapping code and ideas to improve cross-platform app development.  And the ability for Appcelerator to appeal to both sides of the market reflects the changing business models around web-based services.

“For extensions in mobile ecosystem providers, there’s no real critical mass of developers and sellers that have come together,” says Scott Schwarzhoff of Appcelerator.  “That’s the real opportunity as the mobile industry matures.  A lot of 2.0 and 3.0 companies these days present themselves as service-oriented businesses.  They present technology and open it up as an API or SDK for the world to use, and at the same time it’s really hard building a core platform that meets that capability at scale.”

And this is something we’re seeing at the enterprise level as well.  As more businesses create services through the cloud, as much of the stack gets commoditized as possible.  Creating a marketplace around the technology needed to carry us into the future of mobile, Appcelerator is making its appeal to a highly specialized demographic while also extending benefits to partners, which currently include Box and PayPal.  Just as partnerships extend distribution points for cloud services, so too does Appcelerator’s marketplace, facilitating a B2B environment that grants yet another route to ultimately access the end user.