Could offline web apps be the new cell phones?
Over lunch today, I was watching this excellent overview of HTML5 by Brad Neuberg. One of the topics he goes over, along with Canvas, SVG, and native video, is the new app cache + client-side SQL storage, which together make it easy to create full-featured web apps that work just as well without an Internet connection. (It’s like Google Gears, but native.)
My thought was, could this do for web apps what the cell phone has done for telephony in developing countries?
Let me explain what I mean. In developing countries, such as most of Africa and parts of Asia and South America, cell phones have quickly overtaken land-lines as a means of voice communication. According to this source, Africa has more than twice as many cell phones as land lines, for example. The reason, of course, is that less infrastructure is required, so the barrier to entry is much, much lower. You still need a cell tower, but you don’t need to string phone lines everywhere. (Jan Chipchase, who has the really cool job of studying this sort of thing for Nokia, has a lot of interesting things to say on the topic of cell phones in developing countries.)
The same places in developing countries are likely to have Internet connections that are sporadic at best, lower-bandwidth, and probably with a lot more people sharing one connection. (According to this source, 13% of people in developing countries overall had Internet access in 2007.) Could these new features from HTML5 promote the development of relevant web apps that make life easier for someone who can connect to the Internet only once a day? Once a week? Even less often than that?
I have trouble imagining what such an app might be, because I don’t live in that context. Broadly, one category might be applications that pull down a large amount of information and store it for the person to use later, when they don’t have Internet access. Another might be allowing the person to create and store a lot of blog posts or other ‘pushes’ of information, and then upload them all later when given access.
While greater access to information and communications technologies is not a panacea by any means, it sure can do some interesting things.
Could offline web apps be the next tech phenomenon in developing countries? Or are even the smallest netbooks still too big, too expensive, too power-hungry, or too fragile to reach the level of usefulness that cell phones have achieved?
