YouTube announced a major update to it’s m.youtube.com mobile site yesterday. It’s going all HTML5 and the quality of the user interface and the videos themselves puts the native YouTube application to shame. A points from the YouTube blog:
- It’s really fast.
- The user interface incorporates larger, more touch-friendly elements, making it easier to access videos on the go.
- It incorporates the features and functionality you’ve come to expect from the .com site, like search query suggestions, the options to create playlists, the ability to designate “favorite,” “like” or “unlike” videos directly from your device.
- As we make improvements to Youtube.com, you’ll see them quickly follow on our mobile site, unlike native apps which are not updated as frequently.
That last bullet point is a bit of a dig at the native YouTube application on Android, which is lagging pretty far behind the YouTube website. An example of this is that the website uses a simple thumbs up/down system for rating videos while the mobile application is still using the 5-star rating system.
There are a number of things we can learn from this announcement. According to YouTube product manager Andrey Doronichev, the new web-based application is superior in just about every way to the native iPhone application. This is proof that you can create a pretty advanced application using simple HTML5, which should make many app and web developers rethink their options.
This move by YouTube also goes right along with Google’s strategy of not developing desktop applications. They want everything in the browser. Your desktop applications and now your mobile applications as well. We are seeing this with the situation about the unreleased Google Voice desktop application, which may never see the light of day.
One obstacle Google faces here is getting users to visit a website instead of clicking an app icon, but it seems they’ve already thought this through. Visiting m.youtube.com from your iPhone will give you the option to “install” it, which simply puts an icon on your phone that opens the website. The iPhone currently uses a busted icon of a TV for YouTube, but this new icon is the actual YouTube logo.
Doesn’t seem far-fetched that we will see more mobile applications based on HTML5. It’s arguably an easier platform to develop for, it works across iOS and Android, and there is no reason they can’t be monetized just as current applications are.
What’s your take? Will HTML5 change the landscape of mobile applications?
via TechCrunch