Mobile Forecast 2013: The Appification of Everything Transforms World’s 360 Million Websites

Anthony Kosner, content contributor at Forbes has a piece out detailing his predicted changes for 2013 and beyond, and those predictions are not small potatoes.

“The Appification of Everything,” Kosner writes:

is not about adding more icons to your home screen, though, but about a fundamental shift in how we metabolize information and entertainment. The web as the universal storage medium is being superseded by the internet as universal flow medium.

In other words, instead of being a place to just go look up information, the internet will become “an underlying service layer for our application-based interfaces,” with the websites of today going the way of the dinosaur as everything on the web we interact with becomes an app.

Enabling and accelerating this change are several factors. First, Kosner references new, powerful front end software enabling the rapid development of high-performance user interfaces (UIs). In order to enable high-performance content, powerful new back end integration is a must. Up to now, connecting front end and back end in the mobile world has been difficult due to the increasing fragmentation of the mobile device universe. The recent introduction of hybrid app architecture, however, has helped overcome this difficulty by offering an HTML5 web UI with a native “container” or “wrapper” that can access all the gizmos within a device with JavaScript.

Another roadblock has been the lack of skilled developers to build the apps. This challenge is also being solved now with the introduction of development platforms. These platforms give less skilled individuals the ability to create killer mobile apps, while allowing the more skilled to create even better apps at a far higher rate than previously imaginable. Kosner references Brightcove’s AppCloud as a good example of a platform solution. Honorable mentions also go to Adobe PhoneGap and Appcelerator.

The result is that apps are moving out of their simple gaming and entertainment roles and into the hands of knowledge workers who can generate increasing economic value through apps. The App economy was estimated to have been $2 Billion in 2012, according to Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Brightcove.

With more people learning how to code and these new mobile application development platforms helping us do so more easily and quickly, we can expect everything to get appified starting in 2013.

To learn how your company can take advantage of this appification trend, check out Mobile Application Development Platform Buyer’s Guide here.

For the full forbes.com article, click here.