There are more than 160,000 apps available for Apple devices that have been developed over the past two years, while in the six months since the introduction of the Android Marketplace there are already more than 42,000 Android apps available. The lure of having a little icon on the desktop of these devices for apps that can add engaging features to content - and, many hope, premium revenues - is hard for most publishers and services developers to resist.

Yet, curiously, neither the Web nor the power of search engines to get good content in context at the point of demand show any serious signs of going away. In fact, with the continuing expansion of HTML 5 Web standards, Web-enabled applications are starting to interface with many of the mobile sensors that today's apps toolkits enable software developers to exploit. Publishers may be looking to apps as an alternative to the Web for advanced functionality, but the Web itself is becoming increasingly functional and extensible into sensors on mobile devices. Even in today's apps on Apple and Google Android devices, most links in both editorial and ads in these apps lead typically to Web content. The notion that apps are going to make the Web disappear by the desire of publishers willing it to be so is a myth. There is no substantial "there" in apps without the Web.

Nevertheless, apps are going to be with us increasingly as combinations of information and experiences that provide value to audiences in new contexts. As such, apps fit Shore's definition of content, content that still needs to be discovered as Web pages do, even if, perhaps, in different ways. In a sense search engines traverse some apps already by querying databases that drive some Web sites. But the broader question is what happens when unique content gets delivered via apps and not via their Web page equivalents, be it via HTML 5-enabled apps or via apps using proprietary toolkits such as Apple's. There's the strong chance that some sources of content will sink permanently into the "dark Web" again, not to mention new sources of content that will never be discoverable via the Web.

Great minds are thinking about this, of course, but not necessarily equally. One of the great neglected opportunities of the apps era is creating search utilities that can place emerging apps into the right context via search alongside more traditional page-based Web content. Already we get video clips, images and widgets delivered up via search engines that match particular queries or metadata clusterings; why not apps also? Some apps providers may balk at this notion, preferring to keep content consumers corralled into can-like containers that limit their options for cross-pollinating with rival apps platforms. The gaming console industry has certainly managed to keep stores that used to stock software well-lined with CDs that are in essence apps for those devices, so perhaps publishers have reason to hope. But my sense is that it's largely a false hope.

I believe that it's a false hope because browsers aren't going away any time soon. In fact, Web browsers are becoming only more powerful, with ever more technology packed into them to launch advanced applications as well as run-of-the-mill Web pages. Thinking of the rapidly developing Chrome OS operating system, browsers are, in their own way, even becoming devices themselves. If you thought that the iPad was slick, imagine what happens when you get an instant-on device that you can log into once and be enabled for both everything that the Web offers and everything that premium apps offer from one Web-driven touchscreen device? Now imagine one step further - imagine that it's all discoverable via one search utility. Game over, content industry friends.

The same discoverability issues will exist within enterprise firewalls, of course, if not moreso. Most organizations cannot afford to have their content locked into proprietary apps if they are to build business intelligence dashboards from multiple sources rapidly and effectively. Few will have patience for publishers wanting to sell them independent apps "cans" - you may as well tell them to go back to the era of CD-ROM products. No chance. As more enterprise-ready apps make their way to the marketplace, their day-to-day utility to individuals in businesses on mobile platforms will clash more and more with the need for those businesses to break open those cans to increase productivity amongst collaborators. Images of jolly executives toting touchpads to board meetings with print-friendly digital documents are largely mythical representations of how businesses really need to work today. It's not about individual convenience as much as getting teams productive as rapidly as possible. In a corporate world that's trying to break out of its own silos constantly, tight-as-a-can apps for content consumption are silos that few will be able to afford.

With all this said, the new generation of software and content services developed via emerging apps offer tremendous promise as platforms that can deliver real functional value to audiences. However, that functionality in and of itself cannot replace the need to find all of the relevant content that's needed to accomplish personal or organizational goals, be it through an app or any other number of useful content consumption tools. It's the ability to integrate content from multiple sources with multiple sensors that makes apps most valuable; using apps as a short-cut DRM tools based on proprietary standards shuts down most of the value that they have to offer in the first place. So, as you approach your apps strategy, remember at least these three simple rules:

Fast-forward to today, an era in which cloud computing is beginning to absorb both spreadsheet software and much of the content that can be consumed by software. It should come as no surprise then, that Google's recently launched Google Apps Script capabilities are providing publishing abilities that connect Google Apps spreadsheets to the Web in much the same way that investment banks were using them for business processes many years ago. You can now use script programming in Google's spreadsheets to trigger well-formatted emails to contacts, or to feed Web services - say, Salesforce.com, to pick one possible example. More to the point, though, some of the pre-defined scripts include formulas for converting local currencies into foreign currencies and business logic. Hmm, this is not just for casual marketing campaigns, is it.

It would be a far, far jump to say that Google Apps Script is in any sort of position to take on the sophisticated trading environments of investment banks, and, to be truthful, that's probably just as well. But it does point out how easy it has become to use the Web to be a self-programming publishing environment that can support many core business functions with event-driven automated information feeds. As more and more business logic works its way into cloud-driven programming environments, we can expect that both enterprises and enterprise publishers will be adopting these environments as cost-effective ways to deliver more valuable workflow services. Foreign currency trading via Google? Well, those early spreadsheets looked pretty crude at first, also. Watch this space carefully, enterprise publishers, there's more to come.

As a follow-up, though, Rafat pointed me towards a good post on pC's mocoNews site that outlined the case for Apple's approach to mobile apps versus Google's more Web-centric approach. Tricia Duryee points out in this article that Apple had considered emphasizing the browser as the focus of delivering content on the iPhone, but then shifted to its App Store as a preferred method for getting people excited about the potential of mobile devices for delivering useful content and services. As she notes:

[T]he biggest problem facing Google will not be convincing developers, but consumers. Apple’s steroid-enhanced marketing machine has drilled into the public thinking that “there’s an app for that,” not that there’s a URL. Clearly after logging 1.5 billion downloads within a year, Apple is on to something and vigorously training the mobile users of tomorrow.

Sorry, Tricia, but I have to smile at that one. While Apple rolled out a very savvy strategy for the iPhone given its market position as a high-end product oriented towards proprietary intellectual property, I think that it's worth noting that a lot more than 1.5 billion Web pages, many of them with embedded applications, are downloaded every day on the Web. The iPhone's app strategy has certainly made mobile technology platforms far more usable and understandable for its early adopters, much as early premium online information services such as Compuserve and the original AOL made the still-crude world of networked information delivery more palatable. Similarly, early PCs benefited from a galaxy of packaged software that used to line the shelves at local stores, providing "user-friendly interfaces" that made still-crude PC technology more palatable.

But today the walled-garden services of Compuserve and AOL are distant memories, and packaged software for PCs is almost non-existent in most local stores, except for a few have-to-buy items like Microsoft Office software (about the most expensive items to be found on any of the shelves at our local Staples office supply store), accounting systems and tax preparation tools. Why? Because for the most part these products and services were attached to more mature technologies that no longer required packaged IP to help people get to the good stuff. In the instance of software, many of the functions that used to require packaged software are now available via cloud computing services, including tax preparation, bookkeeping, spreadsheets and word processing. In the instance of services like Compuserve, it also became a matter of scale: 65,000 or so iPhone apps sounds like a lot of services, but good luck finding any of them once you begin to scale up to more broad markets. Walled gardens are great when you have a cozy crowd, but most people's interests won't be content to stay in them very long when a good search engine can help them to find the next movable feast easily.

This isn't to say that there is not a valuable place for mobile applications in the mix of marketing strategies for publishers and technology companies. Good functionality with good content being fed into it is a winning combination on any platform. But if we were to speed up the clock and have this discussion a year from now, I don't think that people will be waxing as sanguine about the App Store as they are today - and not just because of Google's Android mobile platform hitting the scene. Real applications, as opposed to the lightly gussied-up browser substitutes that most publishers toss up as mobile applications, take time and thoughtfulness to develop and to roll out carefully.

Yes, a Safari browser is a somewhat different platform than a Chrome browser, and so on, but it's not very realistic to compare the relatively minor differences in how these packages handle largely open Web standards such as HTML compared to the larger, glaring differences between iPhones, Palms, Blackberries and Android phones. Mobile applications will be useful, but there is no practical way to expect publishers to deal cost-effectively with this broad array of approaches simply to get their content to and fro. No amount of seductive ads by Apple or any other platform manufacturer is going to be able to conceal this basic fact, it would seem.

The truth is, of course, that many Web pages are in fact driven by very sophisticated applications already, a fact that will be only accelerated by the emergence of HTML 5, which does more to merge programming functionality into the Web environment than previous versions of the basic code for Web pages. The architecture of today's Google Chrome browser hints at where this is really taking us. When you have more than one page open in a Chrome browser, each tabbed page is its own separate program process on your computer. If one tabbed page has a problem, it can stop functioning without affecting the other opened pages. In other words, Chrome as a browser is actually a multi-process program execution environment.

To put it another way, it really doesn't matter whether you're running a Web page or an application, as long as you can get to it easily in a standardized access environment. Why bother with a page of apps and a separate set of Web page bookmarks when you can have one unified environment where you can access whatever is important to you? Once you have that kind of environment, people will want to have billions of choices filtered by a good search engine or recommendation service rather than a few thousand apps that have to be "mother-may-I"ed through Apple before they can be accessed.

The iPhone App Store has been a very clever and useful marketing mechanism that has allowed Apple to make its platform more palatable and useful in a highly controlled way that's appropriate for any emerging technology. Let's face it, the mobile Web is still a work in progress, making the more sophisticated displays of some mobile apps far more appealing than dealing with the almost-good mobile Web functionality that's available on most platforms today. But given the already mature nature of the Web that's awaiting better browsing via Chrome and other platforms that will not intentionally cripple Web functionality to make more proprietary approaches more palatable to consumers, it's not likely that this artificial Compuserve-like era of iPhone applications can be expected to dominate the mobile content landscape very long.

iPhone apps will endure and even prosper for quite some time, to be sure, just as those early online services such as Compuserve managed to endure for several years after the emergence of the Web. But it won't take long for most content consumers to realize the difference between a transitional technology designed to bolster the margins of publishers and a more satisfying technology that connects them more effectively with the world at large. As long as companies like Apple can create new frontiers of technology that entertain and delight high-end mobile content users, we'll be hearing, "Yeah, there's an app for that" for quite some time. But if history is any guide to the future, it's not likely that any one company will be able to keep that phrase rolling off of their clients' lips when more powerful substitutes are available that intrigue more people more easily. Yeah, there's a Web for that, all right.