A recent debate that have arisen around the not so bright future for web developers and is there now an argument to suggest that there are two groups that have formed in the Web Developers vs mobile web developers.  James Abley from bemoko’s technical team gives us his perspective and views

Ah yes, the tired old Moore’s law thing. I’ve been guilty of worrying about that in the past, ever since I was at Volantis. I’ve always overestimated when it’s going to happen, but I think his timelines are a bit off. I’d say we’re probably 2 years off massive penetration of smartphones, based on the normal 18 month refresh cycle for mobile phone contracts. Some people; e.g. app.ft.com are happy to exclude a large percentage of the possible market. That judgement won’t suit all.

Anecdotally, I would say that mobile web developers are better positioned than desktop web developers, since we’ve got lots of experience about optimising (markup / payload / UX) which desktop people will get, but they need to learn it. That’s based on my experience of talking to other developers at conferences. So I would say that mobile developers are better positioned to deliver mobile and desktop sites, than desktop developers to do the same. The desktop web has got fat [1],and that doesn’t work well on mobile.

And so you have to worry about networks. 4G is still a nascent thing and poor 2G reception is still very common. Knowing how to use the mobile network again is something that mobile people are aware of. There is vast body of (mostly undocumented) knowledge here, in which we do stuff which is common sense to us, then someone else writes a blog and a book about it and gets mildly famous as a result.

Providing intelligent solutions for the web – on the desktop, you’re likely to want to browse and shop, whereas on mobile, you’re more likely to want to get to the store locator, etc.

I do see the distinction between mobile web and PC web being dropped over time, but contextual intent will remain a strong differentiator between good and bad web experiences, on mobile versus desktop.

As to having mobile only platforms; yes, I see them going away. Multichannel is going to become more common, and I would expect Apache to incubate something along these lines soon, if they aren’t already