The Multi-Device Reality (Thoughts on "My Product Feedback")

Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web Responsive Web.

MG Siegler's "My Product Feedback" (in which he advises startups to focus on mobile not just first but nearly exclusively) is well worth consideration, but it is also easy to misinterpret in a dangerous way.

Don't build an app based on your website. Build the app that acts as if websites never existed in the first place. Build the app for the person who has never used a desktop computer. Because they're coming. Soon.

What he identifies is reality: mobile and tablet usage aren't going anywhere and any product being built needs to recognize that fact. However, there is one key thing that I think needs to be made clear:

Just because you should build your app with mobile and tablet in mind doesn't mean you should build native apps and not web apps.

If you're on a plane, at a coffee shop, or otherwise on-the-go notebooks seem increasingly overkill. It can be frustrating to constantly open and shut a laptop as you need to check on this or that. But it's equally frustrating wanting to access something when you're sitting at your desk (whether it be at home or office) and realizing that it's locked away in a native app on your phone.

Modern applications need to acknowledge mobile but, more importantly, they need to acknowledge a one user, many device reality. We don't consume our information on a single desktop computer in our living rooms anymore, but we don't consume it solely only on our phones either. We have smartphones, tablets, laptops, public kiosks, and friends smartphones, tablets, and laptops and we want to use whichever one we want whenever we want. This isn't smartphones vs. laptops or tablets vs. smartphones. Apps that are made for one of the three are inevitably going to frustrate their users when they are using one of the other two devices.

Unless you have an app that is only useful to people on the go, you need to support all platforms. And unless you already have a huge, well-funded development team (and even if you do), supporting all platforms natively is going to be a hole into which you throw countless hours.

Responsive web design is still in its infancy, but it gives us the chance to carve a path forward without losing our minds. It fully embraces a multi- device reality without blinking. It is available anywhere and everywhere without need for installation. And it can be used to provide a great experience whether or not you've ever used a PC before.

"But web is too slow on phones and tablets!" Sure, you can eke more performance from a native UI. That will always be true. But a day is soon coming when everyday users won't be able to tell the difference, just as a similar day came on the PC.

It would be foolish for a company to ignore mobile devices. But it would be equally foolish to pretend that any one class of device will win. To paraphrase, welcome to the future, here are your rectangles.