I just opened an email on my phone. It was from a fellow I don’t know, inviting me to an event I’d never heard of. Intrigued, I clicked on the fellow’s LinkedIn, which was part of his email signature.
That link opened the LinkedIn app on my phone. In the fellow’s LI feed was another link, this one to a tweet he had mentioned in his feed. The tweet happened to be from a person I know, so I clicked on it, and the Twitter app opened on my phone. I read the tweet, then pressed the back button and….
Wait, the WHAT? The back button? But…back buttons only exist in a Browser, on the PC Web, right?
Yes, that used to be true, but finally, after years of chicletized, silo’d apps that refuse to talk to one another, finally, the chocolate is meeting the peanut butter. The mobile operating sysem — well, Android anyway — is finally acting like a big-ass web browser, only better — with sensors, location data, and other contextual awareness.
It doesn’t happen a lot, but thanks to deep linking and the inevitable need of commerce to connect and convert, it’s happening more and more, and it represents the future of mobile. The chocolaty goodness of the linked web is merging with the peanut-buttery awesomeness of mobile devices.
It’s about time.