The advent of mobile apps

While recently looking for a map of Boston University, I found that they actually had an iPhone app, which contains a variety of resources for their students, including the latest news and press releases, videos, campus maps, event calendars, course catalogs and a phone directory. It turns out that several other universities all have similar apps which have similar categories such as the ones mentioned, as well as access to their library catalogs. One of the more unique ones was from the University of Virginia, which includes an augmented-reality guide to their campus, providing users with historical information on various buildings on campus, depending on where they point their iPhone's camera. Some others, such as the ones for Northwestern and University of Texas allow users to track the locations of campus shuttle buses using GPS. At Stanford University, one of the components of their app that they are working on allows for integration of social networking: users can use the app to locate other users who have chosen to share their current locations. Clearly, many of the larger universities are jumping on the mobile app bandwagon, and the numbers only seem to be increasing. In fact, Stanford University even offers mobile app programing courses to encourage their students to develop apps to be shared. One of the potential benefits would be distinctively unique apps which cater to the student experience from an insider perspective.

One question that immediately came to mind was whether these mobile apps serve a special purpose, or if they are just empty shells designed to pull information from websites. After all, all the content on these apps is available on their websites, and can be easily accessed on a desktop or notebook computer. Another category of such apps that comes to mind is those of news websites, such as CNN, New York Times, ABC, Engadget, and Appshopper. While these make content more easily accessible and are a great convenience for users, it seems to me that they ultimately filter content from a website into a mobile format. Do they really add any value to the user experience via the mobile app as compared to using the website on a computer? How do these compare with websites which detect the type of browser being used, and then format their content accordingly for the small screens? Are mobile apps the new bookmark?

Therein lies the rub. It seems that these apps are indicative of the significant change in the manner which people consume their internet content. Where this was once primarily done through their computers, more and more people are now accessing information on their mobile devices. This allows more users to receive information from these sources which may not have been as convenient before. The idea is for these content providers to connect with as many users as possible, which means they have to go where the demand lies. I remain unsure as to whether these apps provide a sufficiently unique experience to differentiate them from the website, but perhaps the main fact is that that these apps allow the content to be formatted for greater ease of use on these devices' smaller screens, and thereby enhances the user experience.