Updated on April 9, 2015
Beyond Responsiveness, the WordPress Mobile Pack Plugin
Disclaimer: This article was originally published by me on SitePoint.com It is NOT licensed under a Creative Commons license and the rights exclusively belong to SitePoint. This is an excerpt and you can check out the full article on SitePoint
We love mobile applications because of their rich user interfaces and experiences, but the discussion of whether a comparable experience will ever be possible on the web is a never-ending one. Web publishers struggle to engage their mobile users due to the complex stages of app creation and engagement, which typically are:
- Create an application
- Publish it in the App Store
- Wait for it to be approved and finally…
- Promote it to your users for installation
A precedent was set in June 2011 when the Financial Times launched their HTML5 browser-based application, proving to the publishing industry that it was possible to succeed outside of App Stores. They were followed by the New York Times, Amazon (Kindle Cloud Reader), Atlantic Wire and others. Today we’re seeing more and more development taking place around HTML5, including Firefox OS by Mozilla, backed by Telefonica.
This demonstrates that the Mobile Web has the potential to go beyond responsiveness and evolve into a new and exciting environment where a site can benefit from environments accessible only to apps. Where user interactions are more important than just page views and ultimately, all apps are interlinked into a Web of apps.