Mobile-related technologies for the past week, in 3 (or almost) words: Google Mobile Search, Chrome Push Notification, Facebook React Native

1. 1
THE WEEK IN 3 WORDS

2. 2
SEASON #02 – WEEK #17

3. GOOGLE MOBILE SEARCH
3

4. 4
Google has slowly shifted its search engine paradigm to
increasingly promote mobile-friendly content in the search
results – see next slide.
On April 21st, this strategy lead to two main announces:
1. Search results will rank better if they are mobile-friendly: sites
that do not comply w/ Google’s policy will likely disappear from
best ranked results
2. Search results will promote applications which content
(indexed from deep-linking) are relevant for the current search,
even if the application is not yet installed on the user’s device
Those two announces replace Google at the heart of the mobile
search war and make the giant a serious contender for the
podium.

5. 5
Google slowly shifting to mobile preference in search
results
June
2012
Google
recommends
Responsive
WEB Design
June
2014
Google indicates
if the indexed
URL would lead
to a mobile-
friendly
homepage rather
than the
expected content
(aka: faulty
redirect)
July 2014
Google indicates
when an indexed
page contains
technologies that
may not be
compatible w/
user’s device
(aka: killing
Flash…)
April
2015
Google ranks
mobile-friendly
content higher
that non-friendly
content in
search results
Google
promotes
Android
application in
search engine
results, even if
the user hasn’t
installed the
app yet
October
2013
Google
promotes
Android
application in
search engine
results, if the
user has
already installed
the app

6. CHROME PUSH NOTIFICATIONS
6

7. 7
Along with the announcement that native applications will appear in its engine
search results, Google has also released a new version of Chrome supporting
Push Notification*.
This enables mobile websites to better engage with its users by sending push
as it’s possible with native mobile applications. And on Android, Push
Notifications can be received even if Chrome is not running.
Google is striking back hard to re-center the search on its own engine. As more
than 80% of the rapidly expanding mobile traffic is driven by applications,
Google’s core business is left apart (and Google’s advertisement revenues are
impacted). Such an announce is a way for Google to regain advertisers
attraction in mobile websites (because mobile websites now have a major
capability only native apps had so far) and, therefore, in their search engine for
discovery.
Mozilla has also started working on the W3C Push API standard
implementation**.(*): http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.fr/2015/04/chrome-for-android-update.html (**): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1038811

8. FACEBOOK REACT NATIVE
8

9. 9
React Native* is a project initiated by Facebook and that has been release Open Source on March 26th.
It aims at providing developer with a JavaScript framework to build native mobile applications. In other words, developers
develop their application using JavaScript and React Native compiles it into native language. So React Native is actually
providing a layer of abstraction to map native components and libraries into JavaScript. The business layer is executed by
a JavaScript interpreter.
This initiative is not quite new in the app world: Apache started hybrid development a long time ago with Cordova, and, closer in their approach
from React Native, Titanium Appcelerator and Xamarin both provide frameworks to build mobile applications leveraging native components from
a layer of abstraction (JavaScript and .NET, respectively).
The advantages of such an approach? Well, you only code your application once and compile it for iOS and Android (at least): it will use native
UI components, which are faster and closer to the OS.
But pitfalls are far more impacting:
• Not all the native UI components are mapped into the layer of abstraction
• The interpreter that runs the business layer is a performances killer, whatever the approach (asynchronous in the case of React Native)
• Despite all efforts, iOS and Android are NOT the same: developers will quickly end up having to maintain two branches for both platforms,
especially if they are using external libraries
• If developing with JavaScript makes it possible to use standard WEB development methodologies, development tools (such as graphical IDE to
build the application views and debugging facilities) provided by Apple and Google are even better when it comes to step-by-step debugging or
identifying memory leaks
React Native is not a vain initiative and may be useful for some specific projects, but even Facebook does not use it for its main mobile
application: native development still is the best option for most of the applications, especially when focusing on user experience and quality.
(*) https://code.facebook.com/posts/1014532261909640/react-native-bringing-modern-web-techniques-to-mobile/