Benedict Evans is on fire

I've been behind my pinboard unread queue for a few days and consequently have been missing the truth pouring out of Benedict Evans.

His last three pieces are right on the money regarding mobile, and the web versus native apps.

Starting with Mobile First, he says:

[...]the smartphone itself is an internet platform in a way that a PC was not. On a PC the web browser was the internet platform, but on a smartphone it's the entire device and the browser is turned from 'the internet' to one icon, just a phone calls turned from the purpose of the device to just one icon.

Then in Apps versus the web he finishes the piece by saying:

In either of these cases - whether you have an app and a website or just a website, you should presume that your customers will engage with you only on mobile.

And finally his last piece The future is mobile and apps, except that it isn't he writes:

So the mobile experience needs to be complete. That might, paradoxically, mean that your total experience might need to be edited, to fit, but it's dangerous to pick a subset of your offer and put just that on mobile - it might be your only touch point. Conversely, one could argue that in some cases it's the desktop experience that should be a subset of the mobile one.

Complete

The mobile experience needs to be complete, and that experience can be just a website, or just an app, or both. Regardless it needs to be complete. Complete is the operative word that binds these thoughts together. As we saw last week, complete includes performance, especially performance on mobile.