LONDON - While the BBC Worldwide is putting most of its efforts around apps for the Apple iOS platform, apps won't maintain their dominance in the future, predicts Daniel Heaf, the head of digital for BBC Worldwide in this session from last month's Beet.TV Global Video Summit - which took place at the BBC Worldwide headquarters.
Heaf says that the closed ecosystem of apps greatly limits discoverability and constrains business opportunities. He sees the emergence of app-like experiences on the Web which will be less costly to create, will work across multiple platforms and will be much easier to find and promote.
Heaf was recently promoted to Chief Digital Officer, a title he will assume in October.
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1) For small developers, which he points out at the end, the App Store is very helpful with monetization (collecting credit card payments is an issue for a small developer facing consumer trust and micropayment issues), customer service, hosting infrastructure, etc. These benefits democratize the app market to a degree which is why there are so many apps (bad for discoverability, good for innovation and choice) and consumers like it. One centralized place for apps has proven very powerful.
2) The power of the app icon. Stats floating around the internet comparing a user's likeliness to use an app vs. visit a mobile website show a pretty big difference in favor of the app. We would argue, admittedly without any data, that the reason is the icon on your phone's screen. It's just more convenient. Users can put icons for websites on their screens but so far it's been a tough sell. Will that change? Probably to some degree.
3) Apple (and maybe Android, not sure if this applies to them) doesn't give access to certain core phone functions via HTML5. Unless that changes, and it may, there are things you just can't do with an HTML5 app.
Does this mean apps will always rule? No, what it does mean is no one can predict the future and likely there will continue to be room for both.