UPDATED 15:20 EDT / JUNE 25 2012

appMobi Spreads the Gospel of HTML5, Sees Facebook as Key to Mobile App Discovery

HTML5 is of growing interest to mobile developers in particular, but many questions have been raised about this gaining standard and its ability to unify our mobile experience.  Mobile development tools maker appMobi  recognizes the apprehension over HTML5, and hopes to ease our minds with some stats that demonstrate a very solid uptake of HTML5 solutions.  Within appMobi’s network alone, some 50,000 developers have built at least one app in HTML5, while 25 percent of their developers have created three or more apps in HTML5.

Just 12 months ago that number was only around 10,000.  The thousands of apps that are around today have been launched 100 million times by end users. Forty percent fall under the media category, while 35 percent are games, and 15 percent of the applications written in HTML5 tie in with retail and direct marketing.

appMobi also noted the not particularly surprising fact that the overwhelming majority of these HTML5 apps are optimized for both Android and iOS, and that the average development time of a hybrid app  is eight weeks.

“We committed to HTML5 way back in 2009 and we have worked long and hard to fill in the missing pieces of this emerging development standard, enabling HTML5 to compete on a level playing field with iOS and Android as a mobile platform.” said Dave Kennedy, appMobi CEO.  “It is extremely gratifying for us to see tens of thousands of mobile app and game developers flocking to HTML5 and using our development tools to create massively cross platform apps that run on iOS, Android, Facebook and the Open Web.”

From appMobi’s perspective, HTML5 truly is a unifying standard, enabling developers to create an app for cross-platform distribution for mobile and even Facebook.  In fact, Facebook’s growing influence in the mobile space makes it a unique contendor to both Apple and Google in terms of app discovery.

It was only earlier this year Facebook seemed to get serious about their mobile strategy, snapping up a ream of popular apps including Instagram and Glancee, and rolling out an App Store that directs to both Apple’s App Store and Google Play.  appMobi is well positioned to enable developers to leverage Facebook’s increasing mobile capabilities, especially when it comes to their social impact on app recommendations and discovery.  appMobi CTO and founder Sam Abadir says that app discovery is becoming far better on Facebook than iOS or Android.

Apple and Google seem fully aware of Facebook’s social influence, having updated iOS 6 for more social integration and Google+ attempting to tie together the many initiatives Google has across mobile and the web at large.  But will it be enough?

“Facebook really does have an opportunity to own discovery in the app space.  They have the most traction in terms of social networking,” Abadir points out.  “I think Apple and Google are doing the right thing if they choose to more deeply incorporate social, but it won’t be productive in the short term against Facebook’s dominance.”

HTML5 is indeed a very big deal for appMobi–the glue that ties it all together, even beyond mobile. For one thing, the developer platform is the company behind jqMobi, an open jQuery alternative that’s written in the language and performs considerably faster on mobile platforms than its competitor.  And while standardization is being accelerated thanks to this initiative and others, the developer tools market is growing even faster.

Today AppCenteral said that it has updated AppGuardian, its cloud-based enterprise app management solution, to include support for Apple’s Volume Purchase Program as well as a number of other features. Embedding policies in applications has become more automated in order to reduce re-development time to a minimum, and admins now have access to more control options via a more straight-forward UI.

Contributors: Maria Deutscher

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