Adobe loves mobile browsers AND applications

A conflict which had been simmering below the surface was sharply highlighted earlier this year. When Apple revealed that the iPad wasn’t going to support Flash, it threw the Flash vs. Web Standards debate into the public eye. Since then, Adobe has been quietly but busily working to improve the experience it provides for mobile. Some of the fruits of that labour are now apparent, with a major update recently to Scene7, Adobe’s media streaming platform, and today’s release of study results into what consumers really use mobile for. Probably the most interest claim is that apps are generally no more popular that mobile browsers, despite the stronger media attention.

What’s Scene7?

Scene7 was an independent company founded in 1999, and bought by Adobe in 2007. It focuses on a few functions, but this release is dedicated to one: streaming media to any platform. If you’re an Adobe client with a Scene7 account, you can upload every single piece of digital media you use (sound, video, text, images) to the Scene7 server. Once that media file is hosted, Scene7 will stream it live to any device or screen you want.

The really pertinent use of this service is for advertising banners. As the file streams from Scene7, it can apply advertising effects in real time (examples below). You can apply badges or strips with any text you want in them, simply by editing the URL of the image where it lands. What this means is that the image as hosted on the server is never touched. It can be streamed to a thousand different sources, each with a different version, different text and different offers – all of those effects are applied by Scene7 between the server and the destination.

And, of course, all of these abilities are in place when you’re streaming to a mobile device. If you’ve set a Flash box up on your mobile site, you can stream your images to that box the same way you would to a full web site. Scene7 will apply effects; detect screen size and scale down appropriately depending on network speed.

The survey results

Adobe ran a survey on 1,2000 US consumers, asking what it is they use their mobile devices for the most. It’s Adobe’s first customer experience survey, and it focuses on what they want in four main areas; shopping, entertainment, finance and travel. It’s a very in-depth survey, so we’ve pulled out what we consider to be the most important findings here:

The majority of people use their phones for entertainment more than anything else. This number is mostly driven by mobile gaming.

People mostly prefer using mobile browsers when it comes to shopping and entertainment, but prefer apps for games, social media and music. This “equal satisfaction” crosses gender and age demographics – the male/female graph is reproduced here as an example:

What we think?

Adobe is pretty definitively not on the application band-wagon. It doesn’t have any objection to them – the AIR platform that Adobe provides for building web applications is currently working towards support mobile applications as well. It was announced at MWC 201 that mobile apps would be supported by the end of the year. And, indeed, Android Market support was revealed earlier this month. But for the time being, Adobe is still very much confined to providing the best browser-based experience it can.

So it’s good to see that Adobe is announcing that mobile browsers and apps are really just about as good as one another. It’s been a rocky year, and the drive being spearheaded by Apple to drop platforms like Flash in favor of web standards like HTML5 has gained a lot of steam. I honestly think Adobe is following the right play at the moment; carefully increasing the amount of services and support it can provide across both browsers and applications on both desktop and mobile devices – and doing so without rocking the boat by claiming that any one platform is superior.