The New Yahoo! Mobile: Because Not Everyone Has an iPhone

Lisa Hoover 0 377 Views

BlackBerry smartphones get love from Google and iPhone gets love from, well, everybody. Most companies that develop mobile apps worry about these two user bases before any other, leaving other mobile phone users out in the cold. According to an announcement out of the in Barcelona, Spain, apparently Yahoo! has stepped up to fill in the gaps.

"Beginning at the end of March, the company plans to roll out a new test version of its mobile Web start page, along with new smartphone applications that consolidate several of Yahoo's mobile services into one application," writes Webware's Josh Lowensohn.

The new mobile app suite will include Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, oneSearch, and a Flickr uploader, all designed to work on any Internet-enabled phone, regardless of model or specs. BlackBerry and iPhone users will get enhanced features like instant notification of new mail, and all smartphone users will get a voice-powered search and a new browser.

Yahoo! is smart to roll out this new bundle if it plans to catch up to Google's suite of mobile apps. Of course the Google grouping still offers more goodies, like news, maps and YouTube, but you have to start somewhere. Google chose to make more apps available to less mobile phones, while Yahoo! offers less options for virtually all phones.

As an interesting aside, Yahoo! chose to leave Android phones completely out of the loop for the time being, although company reps say the an Android app will be released sometime this year.

Deciding how to allocate resources -- toward apps or phones -- is a gamble either way. Who wins this horse race is anybody's guess, though if I had to hedge my bets I'd choose Google.

Dani AI

Generated

Good point from about the trade‑off between chasing flagship platforms and serving the long tail of phones. For long‑term discoverability and widest reach, treat the mobile Web as the primary delivery channel — the W3C’s “One Web” / mobile best practices stress delivering usable content across devices rather than building lots of siloed experiences. (w3.org)

A practical, low‑risk roadmap: choose responsive design as the default (Google recommends it for simplicity and SEO), and only implement dynamic serving or separate m‑site URLs when there is a clear, measurable need. If dynamic serving is used, follow the proper Vary/UA rules and keep content and metadata equivalent between versions. Prefer progressive enhancement and feature detection (CSS @supports, simple JS feature tests) rather than fragile user‑agent sniffing. Include a basic viewport and don’t rely on heavy scripts for primary content:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

(developers.google.com)

Pay attention to SEO and performance parity: mobile‑first indexing means the mobile page is used for indexing and ranking, so structured data, key text, and images must be present on the mobile output. Reduce payloads (responsive images via srcset/sizes), defer nonessential JS, and measure real‑user metrics (Core Web Vitals). Test on a mix of real devices and emulators and monitor with PageSpeed/Lighthouse or the web‑vitals library to catch regressions. (developers.google.com)

Quick checklist to add above a platform play:

  • Start with responsive pages that contain the same primary content and structured data as desktop.
  • Use feature detection, not UA parsing.
  • Optimize images (server‑side resizing + srcset).
  • Measure Core Web Vitals in the field and iterate.

Those steps preserve reach (search and low‑end phones) while leaving room for native apps where deep integration or offline features justify the investment. (w3.org)

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