Successful mobile apps have started to redefine how UIs are designed and how we interact with them, and I don’t think we have yet seen the big change in UI design that I sense is coming. (Voice commands are not the next big thing, but that is another topic.) Successful apps today strip out the cruft from the program, focusing on a few critical features that you need. Apps that are full of menu options, buttons and screens are simply poorly designed. There isn’t the screen real estate available on mobile devices--certainly not on phones--to populate menus and pull downs. On a tablet, the screen can be put to better use. But even doing something as simple as swiping to select text is difficult because it’s hard to be precise when your big, opaque finger gets in the way.
But that is how desktop apps are designed. Lots of features displayed for quick access because you have the room to do it while still providing enough screen space to write a document or work on a spreadsheet. Try using Excel as a thin app on your phone or tablet. See how long it takes for you to get frustrated. Take a look at the screen shot to the left. That’s just one column of a multicolumn spread sheet in Docs to Go. To use the sheet, I have to scroll around. Sure, I could do it in a pinch, but it’s not something I’d live on.
On Android (I don’t know about iOS), for most apps I can long press on the screen, select Share, and send the data, URL or whatever, to other apps. It’s easier than cutting and pasting, and often much more is shared. I probably can’t do that with a VDI or a thin app, which runs its own environment. There are many, many useful features like that which aren’t available.
When I hear people talk about mobile VDI—bringing the desktop to the mobile device—or thin apps on mobile, all I see is a stopgap between a desktop metaphor and a mobile metaphor. It’s a horrible decision because it simply doesn’t work well. By the way, a mobile metaphor on a desktop is just as bad. I give you Windows 8 Developer Preview as an example of a mobile UI that doesn't work on a desktop.
There is a transition period where there maybe a need to use VDI or thin apps on mobile. If you haven’t yet, check out the demonstration apps using Citrix Receiver, which I wrote about in 2009: Citrix Receiver On Android: Your Desktop Anywhere. It’s some pretty cool stuff, and Citrix did some really neat things to make the user experience palatable (VMware and Wyse, as well). But don’t think VDI or thin apps are a long-term solution.
What’s It Going To Take?
If we want mobile apps that leverage remote storage (cloud, private, whatever), then the apps need to be designed to use them. We don’t need to carry old metaphors into the new world. We need new metaphors that take advantage of new capabilities. VMware ThinApp, and I believe XenApp, can cache local copies of apps so that you can use them while disconnected. That’s good, but at that point, why not have an app that is designed to take advantage of the device’s capabilities and merge seamlessly with how the user interacts with the device?
Storage systems need to be capable of seamlessly and reliably keeping data in synch with all connected devices and resolving conflicts intelligently. I need to know that the data is current, and I don’t want to have to think about it.
And we need a ubiquitous network to tie it all together. If we are going to rely on thin apps and VDI, then local application caching will only go so far. Without an available network to connect to, mobile uses will be hobbled.
Until those three problems are solved, fat apps will be required.
