Blackboard Mobile Learn: More on Web vs. Native Development

Update: Literally a minute after I published this, Scott Wilson tweeted about this Slideshare presentation about the relative advantages of web-native development for smartphones.

Thanks to George Kroner for this link to data on student mobile phone usage at University of Edinburgh. Now, this is just one data point, so we have to be careful not to overgeneralize. However, what strikes me about the survey, in addition to the high usage of smart phones in general, is how different the market share numbers are from the U.S. In this survey, Nokia has a full 25% of smartphone market share—substantially more than RIM has. Nokia’s smartphones run Symbian, an operating system that barely registers in the U.S. in terms of market share. It would appear that smartphone market share can be highly variable across different markets.

This may be one reason why the growth in mobile touch-friendly web sites is far outstripping the growth in native mobile apps:

Source: Taptu via GigaOm

Even within the United States, smartphone market share has been highly volatile. Consider this graph from The New York Times:

Source: The New York Times

We tend to forget that, just three years ago, Palm was at the top of the U.S. smartphone market and Apple didn’t have a smartphone. Given that Palm has just been purchased by HP, Microsoft is coming out with a ground-up rewrite of their mobile operating system, and Android is gaining traction fast, making a bet that you know which phones are going to be hot three years from now and developing a separate native app for each of them can be a risky and expensive proposition.

This is part of what makes the Blackboard vs. Moodle dueling mobile strategies interesting. Blackboard has chosen the more expensive native app approach and is charging extra for the capability (a decision that Ray Henderson felt a need to justify in his recent blog post). Moodle has several different approaches being developed by various parties, but the one most closely associated with the Moodle community management is web-native and (of course, given that it’s open source) free. In terms of mobile functionality, we have no real evidence that one platform is leading the other, although I suspect that they will remain close to comparable for the short to medium term.

I have no doubt that Blackboard will make some Mobile Learn sales in the short term (although, given that they don’t break out their sales in their earnings reports anymore, we’ll have no way to know how many Mobile Learn versus Mobile Central sales they make, or how many mobile sales they make in the aggregate). The question is how much pressure will they come under how quickly from their customer base to bundle this capability for free as their competitor does. And will their native app approach yield them a competitive edge that enables them to continue to charge, or will it turn out to be a financial millstone around their necks as they are forced to continue the higher-cost development strategy to provide a free application?

Michael Feldstein is the founder of e-Literate who currently works as the Senior Program Manager for MindTap at Cengage Learning. For more information, see his profile page.

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