Why iPad apps can’t replace your desktop software — yet

If mobile computing is displacing traditional PC computing, where are all the business apps that do on an iPad or Galaxy Note what you can do on a Windows PC or Mac? It’s a question my boss asked me six months ago, and thus, I went searching for a gallery of business-savvy mobile apps. I found the usual small set: Apple’s iWork suite (Pages, Keynote, and Numbers) and Google’s Quickoffice Pro for office productivity, and client apps for cloud storage (Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, and so on), social networking (HootSuite and so on), CRM (Salesforce.com, SAP, and so on), Evernote, and FileMaker Pro.

However, there were no killer apps that show mobile pushing into bold new directions. I haven’t found many examples of homegrown apps, either, for use by enterprises. What gives?

There’s more than one answer to that question, and as a group they paint a fascinating picture of the evolution of apps as the definition of personal computing expands way beyond the PC we’ve known and loved since the early 1980s.

There’s no reason mobile apps can’t be powerful A common knock on mobile apps is that they can’t do what a PC app can do, that they’re basically limited to information access, what pundits call “consumption.” That’s pure BS.

I find, for example, Apple’s Keynote for iOS a much better tool for creating high-impact slideshows than Microsoft PowerPoint or even Keynote’s Mac version. It’s amazingly powerful and well-suited to an iPad’s touch environment. Omni Group’s OmniFocus task manager and OmniGraffle diagramming tool are of a similar caliber. Apple’s iMovie is widely used by video journalists on their iPads because it works very well for editing videos. The music industry is replete with iPad tools for music editing and sound engineering, such as Apple’s GarageBand and Korg’s iElectribe — so much so that iPads are becoming the preferred devices for many musicians. There are also amazing photo editors on the iPad, including Apple’s iPhoto, Google’s Snapseed, and Omer Shoor’s Photogene.

At the next level down are decent editing and creation tools, such as Apple’s Numbers and Pages for iOS, Google’s Quickoffice Pro for iOS (its Android version is less capable), Good.iWare’s GoodReader document manager and PDF markup tool, and Headlight Software’s FTP on the Go Pro HTML editor and FTP client.

But the list thins out from there, especially with business apps. Yes, there are lots of narrow apps such as note-takers, PDF readers, and remote desktops, as well as narrow utilities from translators to business-card scanners. But where’s QuickBooks, Dreamweaver, or InDesign for iPad, for example? (I focus on iPad apps here because the Android app environment is still significantly inferior and is unlikely to be the arrival point for prominent first-mover mobile apps.)

It turns out we don’t use that many PC apps In looking for those up-and-coming killer mobile business apps, I realized how few killer business apps are available for Windows and OS X. The truth is that most people use just three apps on their PCs for business purposes: the Office suite, Outlook or Apple Mail, and one or more Web browsers.

Small businesses likely run QuickBooks Pro, Microsoft Access or FileMaker Pro, along with Microsoft Publisher or Adobe Creative Suite on at least some PCs. Larger businesses will have Access, Visio, and/or Creative Suite on a minority of PCs. Of course, there are highly specialized business tools in use on some PCs, such as those from SAP, Oracle, Infor, SAS Institute, and the like. But those are a small minority of the business population.

So why should we expect mobile users to have more apps in use than desktop users? We shouldn’t. Still, in those specialty areas, it’s true that mobile users are at a disadvantage due to the paucity of equivalent apps for their iPads and Android tablets.

Enterprise app efforts aren’t yet serious because IT isn’t ready If you look at flood of reports issued on mobile trends and the sessions at mobile-themed conferences, you’ll hear lots of talk about how enterprises need to put mobile first and focus on developing apps to take advantage of all those smartphones and tablets flooding their workers. Well, they probably should, but most aren’t.

Many companies’ IT departments are still arguing that mobile is a risky fad that must be contained, since it’s now clear it can’t be completely blocked. These IT shops still have the delusion they can install a desktop virtualization client on all those mobile devices and force users to run data-center-delivered Windows apps on their tablet, so they won’t get serious about true mobile apps, whether native or, more likely, client-accessed back end. Meanwhile, users find their own apps, usually tied to cloud services that let them move forward without IT.

But even those not stuck in a not-so-golden past are doing little with mobile apps. My informal survey of mobile app security firms showed little serious development by their clients, for example. Alan Murray, vice president of products at mobile app security vendor Apperian, for example, tells me that, for most companies, existing efforts focus on one of three areas:

• Toy apps such as lunch-ordering apps designed for testing purposes and internal skill-building
• Client apps to companies’ highly customized sales-force automation environments
• Expense reporting

My talks with analysts back up the notion of businesses not yet really being serious about developing mobile apps. That’s not to say there aren’t serious mobile efforts, Murray says. He cites sophisticated augmented-reality apps used by the oil and gas industry to help identify and assess failed components on offshore oil rigs, where the savings from preventing failures and quickly addressing those that occur more than pays for the high development costs for such apps, and where lightweight, portable devices such as iPads are much more suited than laptops. Kiosk sales apps are another example of where some companies have made real investments in tablet apps, he notes.

But for the most part, enterprises aren’t really ready to embrace mobile technology in a meaningful way. Until they do, there won’t be many serious enterprise mobile apps.

Why major developers fear to offer mobile apps It’s quite possible to deliver highly functional, easy-to-use apps for at least the iPad. Given the skyrocketing sales of tablets for both personal and business use, having iPad and perhaps Android versions of the desktop mainstays would seem to be a natural move.

But economically, delivering those mainstay apps is a very dangerous move. For example, QuickBooks Pro 2013 for Windows has a list price of $250, though it’s often sold for $150. InDesign costs $700. But name an iPad app that costs anywhere close to those prices. You won’t find one. Each iWork app costs $10, Quickoffice Pro costs $18, GoodReader costs $10. The costliest business apps on the iPad — Omni Group’s OmniGraffle and OmniPlan — cost $50 each.

The economics of mobile apps don’t work for an Adobe, Microsoft, or Quicken. It’s not just the initial purchase’s dramatically lower cost in mobile. Desktop software makers have long had a model where customers are expected to upgrade every few years — whether they need to or not — and thus put another $150 to $250 in the developer’s bank account. For enterprise software, businesses pay an annual “maintenance” or “client access license” fee — in truth, a subscription charge. That model is coming to the desktop. Microsoft now offers Office for $99 per year, and Adobe offers Creative Suite for $240 per year. The promise is that users always have the latest software, but we all know 1996’s Office 97 had almost everything we need (hyperlinks were missing) and 2008’s Adobe Creative Suite CS4 was the last version where a $100-plus upgrade fee was worth paying.

So far, the app store model doesn’t really support the notions of regular paid upgrades or subscription pricing. Yes, some apps have reached end of life and replaced with new versions that essentially force an upgrade, but it’s a rare occurrence.

The subscription pricing model has run into a battle over whether the app store should get a cut for each year, as Apple demands for subscriptions sold via the iTunes App Store or just for the initial sale. Software publishers have long forked over as much as 50 percent of the sales price to stores to sell shrink-wrapped software, so paying Apple or Google 30 percent wasn’t that hard to accept — but publishers kept most of the revenues from subscription sales, paying a much smaller fraction to companies such as Digital River that managed the download validation and distribution. Apple’s 30 percent take for each renewal has been hard to swallow.

Until the fight over who earns what works itself out, there’s even less reason for major software publishers to release their apps for the iPad or Android. So it will be small companies like Good.iWare, companies with a niche market like Omni Group, companies with a different agenda like Apple, and — most important — companies that don’t sell software but a service accessed through a client app that we’ll find in our favorite device’s app store.

The post-PC app model is a work in progress The client app model also best fits the emerging post-PC world where people work from multiple devices and locations, so they’re more interested in being able to do their work than to manage a collection of apps. In other words, they’ll gravitate to services they can access from their PCs, Macs, iPads, iPhones, Androids, BlackBerrys, Kindle Fires, or whatever, whether via a browser or a client app.

That’s the model behind Google Apps/Google Drive, Dropbox, Salesforce.com, SAP, and so on. Even Microsoft’s Office 365 is a step in that direction, though today it requires downloading a big fat app to a Windows PC or Mac and using a limited Web version on anything else. The limitation of Web apps means we’ll probably see client apps as the main conduit, rather than browser-based HTML tools.

The limits of HTML5 apps is why Google had to buy Quickoffice for use as the front end to its Google Apps on mobile devices — the mobile Web version of Google Apps is poor, versus the barely adequate experience on a desktop browser. But the latest version of Office 365 for the iPad shows progress is possible. Google continues to work on its mobile Google Drive editing client as well; over time, HTML5 may become a decent base for creation apps.

Whether through client apps or browser access, we can expect to see more apps delivered as subscription or ad-supported “free” services with access from whatever device you happen to have — that is, once software publishers can charge at least as much for this pan-device access as they have for desktop applications. That could take years, given how we’ve been trained by the Apple and Google app stores to think of apps as costing just a few dollars. It depends on how quickly people transition to non-PC devices as their mainstay products.

In the meantime, we’ll have a few mainstay apps like iWork and Quickoffice that, along with the mobile devices’ email and Web apps, will let most users do the bulk of their desktop work on their tablets. We’ll have lots of utilities that fill in some of the gaps, such as the half-dozen unofficial SharePoint clients, dozens of PDF editing tools, and limited-access client tools such as PageTools’ iDML to view and do basic editing of InDesign documents and FTP on the Go Pro to do basic HTML editing. And we’ll have lots of front-end clients to services like Dropbox, Salesforce.com, and Google Apps — many of them are available today, and we’re seeing this client approach transform the health care industry by enabling a fast shift to iPads as the main PC for patient treatment.

Mobile apps aren’t equal to desktop apps, for the most part. But many are more capable than you may realize, even if there is plenty of room for growth once the economics are figured out.

This article, “Why iPad apps can’t replace your desktop software — yet,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.