Will Magento mobile rock the App store?

For a while now, Magento has been working on what they are referring to as Magento mobile. In short, it is an extension by means of which Magento store owners can create native iPhone apps (more platforms to be added in the future) that enable their customers to browse their store(s). Last week I joined a webinar to have a look at a live presentation of this extension and I had a look at the extension and its source code today. And – I just cannot help it – thought I’d added my two cents.

It looks like the new era of mobile commerce: Just install the new Magento mobile extension into your store – it is said to work in recent versions of the Community Edition (1.3+), the Professional Edition (1.6+) and the Enterprise Edition (1.8+) -, pay the one-time setup fee of USD 799,00 as well as the yearly maintenance fee of USD 699,00 and have the Magento system build your own custom-designed iPhone app. Rather than spending a sizeable part of your budget on custom app development, you do the customisations yourself and in no time have an app users can use to browse the store and purchase store items. (More information and screenshots of the interface in action can be found in the Webinar recap.)

Native vs. web-based apps

There are more than 225,000 native apps on the Apple App Store right now, downloads have surpassed the 5 billion figure. With more than 100 million devices sold these apps can run on, they surely provide a ton of opportunity. Those apps have access to the entire hardware, ie. the respective APIs of the devices they run on, e.g. camera, gyrometer, GPS etc. Also, they can create push messages to the user, which is quite handy in case of apps such as Facebook and Twitter. Interface designers can get creative and invent all kinds of new uses, as for example the range of new games shows.
In order to create such a native app, developers need to make use of the SDK provided by Apple, obtain a developer’s license and start coding their applications using Objective-C and the Cocoa Interface builder. Afterwards, they need to follow a set of guidelines in order to get those apps into the App Store.

Web-based apps, on the other hand, don’t require this procedure. In effect, they are specially crafted websites which are accessed via the Safari web browser. Using the HTML5 standard, interface developers can create their code in such a way that they make a nice application in the mobile browser window. This means that, rather than seeing a minified version of the website in question – which is the standard – the mobile device renders this website differently, making it perfect for use with the iPhone or the iPad. A good example of those web-based apps is the mobile version of Facebook, which makes it possible to use the website properly even on a small screen such as the iPhone’s. (For more information on web-based vs. native apps, see Apps vs. Web by Craig Hockenberry.

Magento’s app generator

Having had a glimpse at the source code of Magento mobile it seems that it mainly does two things: First of all it provides the necessary interface for letting shop owners customise their own app and send its specifications to Magento Inc. They will have some sort of process in place that turns those specifications into a native app and place them into the App store. Secondly, it generates a sort of additional XML layer that feeds the app and provides all the necessary catalog data.

The second part of this extension, in my view, is the goodie because it provides XML-structured information regarding the shop frontend, which is the source for the native app’s more lightweight checkout process. However, the native app itself, which is the first part of this extension, seems questionable. Given that every Magento store owner could have one or more apps for his store(s), this would eventually lead to a flood of new apps that would only slightly differ regarding a few layout parameters. In other words, the code base for all those apps waiting to be submitted to the App store would be quite similar, which is something I think Apple wouldn’t approve of at all in the long run.

But even if a good amount of those apps made it through the approval process, I find it hard to imagine that potential customers would download all those apps. It might be that there are some larger and well-known brands whose fans will embrace such a possibility, but this is an exception to the rule. For a native app to be successful it needs to provide some added value for those who install it. But other than browsing the product catalog and checking out the respective products, those new Magento apps will add nothing new.

Far better suited for this kind of shopping experience are web-based apps. Why not provide a streamlined XML interface and let frontend developers come up with a great mobile version? The iPhone theme, which was published in 2008 already was a step into the right direction, and I think in the long term store owners are better off concentrating on universal, platform-independent web apps than native apps for each and every platform.