A few words on the subject…
For the smARTphone tours at the Dallas Museum of Art we very deliberately chose to go with a web based app over an iPhone app. There are a variety of reasons that we’ve done this which are:
1) iPhone apps only work on the iPhone 2) We want to encourage visitors to view the content on their own devices – whatever they may be 3) We want a system that will adapt to future technologies and trends 4) We want a system that resides in “the cloud” that can store unlimited resources and assets
Now having said that, there are many institutions that have opted to build an iPhone app. Some of the benefits to this route are:
1) Ability to take advantage of a more powerful programming toolset 2) Visibility in the iTunes store 3) Option for viewing content without an internet connection
If these options fit an institutions criteria then the iPhone app route is a good way to go. We discussed some of these options in depth, but for us there were some reasons that countered the above.
1) Objective C and Cocoa are simply awesome, but an iPhone app is platform specific. Those without the device its coded for miss out. 2) I wouldn’t really call the iTunes store a hub of social networking 3) On the scale we are producing content, expecting users to download huge amounts of data just to have them offline is way too unreasonable.
Now having said all that… I realize that it sounds MUCH more cool to say you’ve designed an iPhone app than it does to say we have a mobile website optimized for phones… I promise you there is no bigger Apple fan boy than myself – trust me. But I think its much more important to look at the bigger picture.
Last week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google CEO Eric Schmidt (until last year on Apple’s board of Directors) cited some interesting statistics in his keynote. His point in the keynote is the growth rate of mobile devices is way accelerated way beyond what we saw in personal computers over the last 20 years. Most of the real power, he states, is when you have small devices that have the ability to connect to server power via cloud computing.
Now Google is an amazing company. They are really good at developing some of the most interesting and useful technology available today and are also really bad at promoting it all.
For those who are familiar, Apple denied Google approval of the Google Voice app on the iPhone. Google has responded by building one of the strongest web-apps I’ve seen. They’ve leveraged HTML5 to build an online phone app… that can make calls from your phone. Simply amazing.
I think Google have made some extremely progressive strides in mobile cloud computing – the example I just mentioned, voice recognition, image recognition, the ability to search or translate on the fly… it goes way beyond the simple concept of “where am I” types of applications that have been popular to this point.
Now does our system contain this type of functionality? Heavens no – I wish! We are on version 1.0. But the idea is to have a system that can grow to fit our needs. This functionality can certainly adapt to specific needs down the road – we could integrate into an iPhone app, we could integrate to any platform specific device if it fit a need for us. The power is in the cloud, not on one type of phone.
I think this is where things will be down the road – not just for us but for everyone.
[...] Read this article: Web Apps vs iPhone Apps for Museum Content | blog.tedforbes.com [...]
Totally agree, why develop an app for 1 platform at a time? It may sound sexy, for all the right reasons you want to have one generic platform. Explorer and Firefox don’t mind either on what brand computer they are installed.
With Layar and Muzar contentowners can make use of this 1 platform for IPhone, Android and Symbian (approx. q3 2010). Free, easy to use and widely available.
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An excellent post and one which brings a bunch of different strands together that I have been banging my drum about for a very long time.
The iPhone is great, and developing apps is also simple, but developing a platform for your institution that is dependent on one platform sucks.
I much prefer the idea of developing content via web apps for phones. It means that you can use a single framework to optimise content for whatever device, and as more of them advance, we can more readily start building sites with on and offline content. I don’t think being online or offline once in the museum need be an impediment.
Exceedingly sophisticated apps can be developed for the web and directing people to your museum site is much more useful for tracking purposes, than it is to send them to the app store. This also means that the domain for the museum, is the single source for information about the museum, rather than spreading it across the net, and people know where they can find it.
Being able to develop an iPhone app is an unnecessary barrier to entry for museums to a single platform and relying on browsers to share content is a much more viable means. Whats more is, this doesn’t necessarily preclude you from rolling out an app too, but at least you have a lot more bases covered to begin with.
Anyhow, that’s my 2 cents for now. Thanks again for the great post.
Thanks Vincent
[...] just read the article, Web Apps vs iPhone Apps for Museum Content, by Ted Forbes, and previously looked at the posting on Museum Marketing, Mobile Friendly Museum [...]
Vincent,
Clear, comprehensive and well-reasoned post! Thank you very much.
Having early on abandoned an iPhone app for Open Museum’s mobile tour, we settled on a web-based one. Called Mobeum, it’s up and running with our pilot partner the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. We’ve written a series of posts about its development in the Open Museum blog and will be presenting a paper about it at Museums in the Web. You can also take a peek here in the Open Museum mobile view if you go to the Hood and select “Tour”.
It would be great to learn more about your experience. If you’re interested in talking, just let me know!
Maureen
Hi Maureen – would love to talk. I’ll check out Mobeum!
Hi Ted,
(Sorry, called you Vincent!) I’d love to chat, too. I’m on skype at xxx or drop me an email maureen@xxx.xx. I can show you Mobeum (which goes public in April).
Maureen
Thanks Maureen – I’ll be in touch – love to see the project!
Ted,
Check out http://www.juncanoo.com. I’m a student at the university of Pennsylvania developing apps for museums and I’d love to talk with you about it all. The application we’ve built straddles this problem by generating content both to apps for the iphone (Blackberry and android versions are coming in may) and to web apps (for which the DMA provided some inspiration). I’m sure you have some great ideas and ton of knowledge on the space. Please email me if at all possible and we’ll talk in some detail.
We’re in the appstore here: itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/exhibit-by-juncanoo/id344358052?mt=8 or search for “exhibit by juncanoo”. Would love to hear what you all think.
Ayo