Reminiscent of the debates of the waxing and waning of the ideal size of the client (as in client/server) during the 1990s, the mobile apps vs. mobile web debate seems equally sinusoidal.

For those millennials who were too young to remember, the client/server revolution taught us the virtues of transforming the all-powerful mainframes combined with “dumb clients” into a configuration of slightly less powerful server machines coupled with “fat clients.”  Not long thereafter, spurred on by Moore’s law and the creation of Mosaic, precursor to Netscape, the IT experts proselytized the ideal of using servers to run the bulk of the application processing while letting end users access the applications via a web browser on a “thin client.”

Of course, this is all a deliberate oversimplification, and there was no shortage of wisdom on the varied architectures of the optimal IT deployment.  I even recall one particular self-confessed “thought leader” denouncing our collective obsession with IT buzzwords and our resulting over-reach in condemning those formerly “fat clients” to a fate of thin presentation-layer vehicles.  This particular guru’s cure-all innovation: create a “‘buff client’, one that is neither fat nor skinny, but muscular, like a dude you would see on Venice Beach.”  (I swear those were his exact words).

{ Speaking of cure-alls, remember back in the days when the hottest emerging IT management software companies had names like “Panacea” or “Remedy” ? }

Anyway, back to the mobile app vs. mobile web debate.  As we are all old to enough to know, once mobile phones had some nominal screen size, the mobile web became hot.  It started with low-quality wap sites or transcoded internet sites, then progressed to legitimately respectable professional mobile web sites.  Then came the iPhone, and everything changed (or so we were led to believe).  Indeed, the iPhone changed a lot.  Its impact is worthy of books and I won’t elaborate in detail except for this one point:  the iPhone legitimized the notion of downloadable mobile apps.  If the iPhone did not represent a true innovation in the strictest sense of the word, the AppStore did.

So unsurprisingly not long thereafter, and even still today, a decent proportion of the domain experts ponder whether apps will render obsolete the (now ho-hum) mobile web sites.  It’s a valid intellectual exercise (“Apps will replace all mobile web sites” vs. “Apps are a temporary phenomenon which will fade when LTE arrives”).

Last week, the AppStore hit 300,000 apps; whereas the Android Market boasts close to 100,000 and is growing even more quickly.  Not to mention Bada, Ovi, et al…

Then yesterday, an admittedly less-scientific survey commissioned by an admittedly not disinterested telecoms infrastructure company, found that less than 40% of smartphone users in the UK actually download apps.  Specifically, a poll of 1,000 mobile customers in the UK found that only 39% of consumers that have the ability to download apps regularly do so.

With a lack of revenue-generating potential from mobile apps, the research “strongly suggests” that operators should concentrate their app strategy on enhancing their traditional comms services, as “this is their core skills area and what the users value in their phone.”

And so the evidence, reciprocally volleying between Apps and Mobile Web, continues to bounce in.  Of course, like all such duality-shaped duels of this nature, the final conclusion is most likely that both apps and the mobile web will co-exist, and once passions permit this will become obvious to us all.