Shifting Google Gears to mobile
Ever use a mobile web application and suddenly lose your cell connection? That's happened to me many times. If you've shared my pain, you'll be excited to know that we've launched Google Gears for mobile, which lets users access Gears-enabled mobile web apps offline.
Context & Ripple Effects
Gears had already drawn scrutiny over its trade-offs in a critique of the first Gears release, while 2007 coverage positioned Google's broader platform push against Microsoft. Mobile offline access extends that contest from desktop browsers to devices with unreliable connections.
The launch is significant because it gives Gears-enabled mobile web applications a way to retain utility during connection loss, making local capability part of the mobile web application design rather than an exception.
First-order effects
- Developers of Gears-enabled mobile web apps can support offline use cases, reducing the immediate disruption users face when a cellular connection drops.
- Google Gears becomes a more relevant foundation for mobile web applications, not solely browser applications used on desktop machines.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's stated interest in eventually taking Silverlight offline is more directly comparable: Google is putting an offline mobile-web capability in developers' hands while that adjacent platform is still framed as future-oriented.
- Mobile web developers must weigh the benefit of offline behavior against the implementation concerns already raised in the earlier Gears critique.
Third-order effects
- If offline support becomes a baseline feature of mobile web tooling, competition between web platforms shifts toward which runtime gives developers the most dependable device-level behavior under intermittent connectivity.
The trend: Mobile web platforms are adding local, offline capabilities to make browser-based applications viable beyond continuous-network use.