This raises some relevant questions for mobile companies especially around the intentions of HTML5, the timing when HTML5 may pose a threat to the app market, the growth of mobile internet traffic and the implications of this technology to mobile products.

1. HTML-5’s impact
On the mobile content market
By,
Avinash Bharadwaj
Tanushree Jana
27th
Oct 2011

2. HTML-5 impact analysis
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Table of Contents
1. Executive summary......................................................................................................3
2. Introduction ...................................................................................................................4
3. HTML-5 implementation projections ............................................................................6
4. HTML-5 threat to native app market ............................................................................9
5. Growth of mobile web.................................................................................................12
6. Conclusions ................................................................................................................14
Tables and figures
Figure 1: Potential future of web apps because of HTML5.........................................................3
Figure 2: Potential future of web apps because of HTML5. ........................................................4
Figure 3: Evolution of HTML5 feature implementations. ...........................................................7
Figure 4: Potential future of web apps because of HTML5. ........................................................9
Figure 5: Evolution of threat from HTML-5 to native app user-base .........................................10
Figure 6: Implementation status of features influencing threat on native apps.........................10
Figure 7: Global mobile internet users. Mobithinking..............................................................12
Figure 8: Global internet traffic. CISCO...................................................................................12
Figure 9: Traffic per billion users per month, calculatedfrom Figures 8 and 9. ..........................13
Table 1: HTML5 features and their descriptions........................................................................5
Table 2: Current implementation status of HTML5....................................................................6

3. HTML-5 impact analysis
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1. Executive summary
Today there is a lot of speculation about HTML5’s timing and impact on the mobile
content market. HTML5 based web apps do come with some favorable attributes which
make HTML5 a potential threat to the app market. This raises some relevant questions
for mobile software companies especially around the timing when HTML5 may pose a
threat to the app market, the growth of mobile internet traffic and its significance to STIR.
The analysis concludes the following
 HTML 5 features that relate to ‘ease of coding’ have had maximum
implementation on various phones. They would be 100% complete by 2012. All
features but Web workers would get implemented by 2015. Web-workers might
take the longest to be implemented, potentially by 2019.
 63% of the user-base of native apps can be potentially replaced by HTML-5
based web-apps by 2014. The threat saturates at around 63% as native apps will
continue to dominate wherever processor intensive functionalities are required. It
is however, another question as to how long will the industry take to adopt
HTML5 thereby replacing native apps.
 According to some of the studies published online, it is estimated that
o The total global mobile internet activity would increase 26 times
o The global mobile internet users are expected to increase by 88% by
2015.
o The traffic per user on HTML5 can potentially increase by 8.4 times (60%
of 14)
Figure 1: Potential future of web apps because of HTML5

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2. Introduction
Today there is a lot of speculation about HTML5’s timing and impact on the mobile
content market. HTML5 based web apps do come with some favorable attributes which
make HTML5 a potential threat to the app market. This raises some relevant questions
for mobile software companies especially around the intentions of HTML5, the timing
when HTML5 may pose a threat to the app market, the growth of mobile internet traffic
and the implications of this technology to the internal product.
HTML5 is the fifth revision of the HTML standard. .HTML is a language for structuring
and presenting content for the World Wide Web, a core technology of the Internet
originally proposed by Opera Software. As of October 2011, HTML5’s specification is still
under development, which is expected to end by 2014.
HTML5’s core aims have been to improve the language with support for the latest
multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by
computers and devices (web browsers, parsers, etc.). HTML5 is intended to subsume
not only HTML4, but XHTML1 and DOM2HTML (particularly JavaScript) as well.
It is said that HTML5 is likely to increase mobile web content consumption and pose a
threat to the native app market as shown in Figure 1. This is because it offers valuable
mobile web features that can help develop cross platform apps in a short period of time
with a good user-interface. A list of these features and their implications is presented in
Table 1.
In order to quantify this impact, the next section analyses the current and future
implementation status of HTML5.
Figure 2: Potential future of web apps because of HTML5.

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HTML5 Features Description
Extended video support Introducing new video element
Extended audio support Introducing new audio element
Extended form concept
Including new forms of input types, input
attributes
Miscellaneous new Element Types and
Attributes
including section and grouping elements like
<article>, <header>, <footer> or <figure>
and semantic elements like <mark>
Extended User Interaction Concepts
Enable native drag & drop and undo history
functionality
Microdata
Enable semantic annotation of content with
labels
2D Animation Rendering
Enable 2D animations based on the new
<canvas> element
CSS3 in General
Indicate the level of support regarding
features and concepts introduced with
CSS3
CSS3 Selectors
Indicate the level of support regarding the
CSS3 Selector concept
Geolocation API
Provide access to the devices current
location based on GPS data, GSM/CDMA
cell IDs, network signals and alike
FileReader API
Facilitate file access to the devices
underlying file system
Offline Web Application Support
Enable users to continue interacting with
web applications and documents even when
their network connection is unavailable
Webstorage
An extension of the Offline Web Application
support, allows to actively store key/value
pairs on the client side
IndexedDB
An extension of the Webstorage concept,
provides a complete client-side database
Local Devices Support
Enables access to connected devices (e.g.
USB devices) based on the <device>
element
3D Animation Rendering (WebGL)
Enables creating 3D animations with the
HTML5 <canvas> element (eg. 3
Dimensional effects like a globe spinning)
Web Workers
Provide an API for running background
scripts in the context of the browser, but
independent of user interface scripts
Table 1: HTML5 features and their descriptions

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3. HTML-5 implementation projections
The World Wide Web Consortium has announced that it will be able to release a full
specification of HTML-5 by 2014. However, in order for HTML5 to be useful, these
features will need to be implemented into browsers of individual handsets.
Current implementation status:
The Netbiscuits Mobile Web Metrics report Feb 2011, as shown in Table2, has studied
the implementation status of 17 HTML-5 features over a sample of 2000 devices, across
15 handset models. It shows whether a certain feature is fully implemented, partially
implemented or not yet implemented. The list below constitutes 50% of the market; the
rest is a very long tail.
It is interesting to observe from Table2, that Apple’s Safari is the implementation leader,
followed by Android. However, each phone’s implementation makes a large or small
impact based on its user-base.
Table 2: Current implementation status of HTML5

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Future implementation status:
The evolution of the implementation of various categories of HTML-5 features, has been
projected in Figure 3, based on Table 2 and the user-base of each of the phones listed,
Figure 3, below suggests that HTML 5 features that relate to ‘ease of coding’ have had
maximum implementation on various phones. They would be 100% complete by 2012.
On the other hand, webworkers may take the longest i.e. by 2019, to get implemented.
Please see Table 1 in section 3 to understand what each of these features mean.
Figure 3: Evolution of HTML5 feature implementations.
Methodology
The projection has been arrived at by
o Using the Netbiscuits report that has analyzed the implementation status of 17
mutually exclusive features of HTML5 over a sample of 2000 devices
o Calculating a completion score (%) for each feature based on the completion
status in each device and the user-base of that device. For example: If there are
3 handsets with completion scores of 0%, 50% and 100%, with market shares of

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20%,30% and 50%, then the completion score is be [(0% * 20%)+(50% *
30%)+(100% * 50%)].
o The slope for each feature has been calculated using a completion rate. The start
of the slope is when the respective feature specification was released and the
end of the slope is the current completion score as per the netBiscuits report.
o Assumption: The implementation will continue at the same rate as earlier.
Implications
The features are at different stages of implementation and thus the threat is likely to vary
with time. As can be seen in figure 3, most features are likely to get implemented by
2015. Web-workers are likely to get implemented by 2019. Thus, there is an increasing
threat to the native app market. The next section attempts to explore the threat to the
native app market.

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4. HTML-5 threat to native app market
HTML5 can offer a significant threat to the native app market. Starting 2014, it would be
possible to replace 63% of the apps with HTML5 based web apps. It is however, another
question as to how long will the industry take to adopt HTML5 to replace native apps.
Figure 3, shows the evolution of this potential threat with time. It is important to
understand that even though 100% of the HTML5 features get implemented by 2015, the
threat to native apps remains at 63%. This is because the 37% of the mobile internet
consumption would be processor intensive which cannot be fulfilled by HTML5.
It is also important to note that although all features of HTML5 may get completed by
2019, the threat % saturates starting 2014. This is because only some features like
audio/video support, local device support and CSS3 selectors help decide whether an
app can be replaced by its HTML-5 counterpart.
Figure 4: Potential future of web apps because of HTML5.
Methodology
The threat has been estimated in the following manner:
1. Categorize the set of native apps available in the Android market based on their
functionality.
2. Estimated the user-base of each type of native app based on the average rating.
Source: Statistics from the android market.
3. Defined that a native app is potentially under threat from HTML5 if:
a. It is possible to develop the required functionality with the available
features of HTML-5
b. It is easier to develop the app using HTML-5
c. The required functionality is not processor intensive. Therefore the
performance of an HTML-5 based web app would not be compromised
much.
4. Measured threat to native apps as the percentage of user-base that it can
potentially capture based on the above conditions.
Note: Not all features of HTML5 contribute towards threat to current native apps.

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Figure 5: Evolution of threat from HTML-5 to native app user-base
Figure 6: Implementation status of features influencing threat on native apps

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Implications:
The above analysis implies that it would make sense for the industry to move towards
HTML5 development starting 2014. It also means that beyond a point, native apps are
likely to be necessary. The threat saturates around 63%.
This also implies that there is a potential for the growth of mobile web due to HTML5.
This is explored in the next section.

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5. Growth of mobile web
HTML5 poses not just a threat to the app market but also has the potential to increase
mobile web content consumption. As seen in Figure 1, not only does the overlap
increase but the size of the Venn diagram also increases.
According to some of the studies published online, it is estimated that
 The total global mobile internet activity would increase 26 times (Figure 8).
 The global mobile internet activity using HTML5 can increase by 15.6 times (60%
of 26)
 The global mobile internet users are expected to increase by 88% by 2015.
(Figure 9)
 The traffic per user is expected to increase by 14 times. (Figure 10)
 The traffic per user on HTML5 can potentially increase by 8.4 times (60% of 14).
Figure 7: Growth of mobile web
0
2
4
6
8
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Global traffic - exabytes/month
0
500
1000
1500
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Global mobile internet users
(mn)
Figure 8: Global internet traffic. CISCO Figure 7: Global mobile internet users. Mobithinking

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Figure 9: Traffic per billion users per month, calculated from Figures 8 and 9.
Implications:
The mobile internet traffic growth is actually happening due to increase in internet
consumption per person, not because of growth in user-base. This is because the user-
base seems to grow only by 88% by 2015 while the traffic per user grows by 8 times!
HTML5 is likely to be one of the significant reasons behind this growth.
0.00
1.00
2.00
3.00
4.00
5.00
6.00
7.00
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Traffic per billion users per month (exabytes)

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6. Conclusions
Conclusions
 HTML 5 features that relate to ‘ease of coding’ have had maximum
implementation on various phones. They would be 100% complete by 2012. All
features but Web workers would get implemented by 2015. Web-workers might
take the longest to be implemented, potentially by 2019.
 63% of the user-base of native apps can be potentially replaced by HTML-5
based web-apps by 2014. The threat saturates at around 63% as native apps will
continue to dominate wherever processor intensive functionalities are required. It
is however, another question as to how long will the industry take to adopt
HTML5 thereby replacing native apps.
 According to some of the studies published online, it is estimated that
o The total global mobile internet activity would increase 26 times
o The global mobile internet users are expected to increase by 88% by
2015.
o The traffic per user on HTML5 can potentially increase by 8.4 times (60%
of 14)
Key assumptions:-
 The completion score of each HTML-5 feature increases linearly.
 The user-base of a certain category of apps is directly proportional to its average
rating
Implications
 It would make sense for the industry and mobile software companies to move
towards HTML5 development starting 2014. It also means that beyond a point,
native apps are likely to be necessary. The threat saturates around 63%.
 It may appear in the beginning that the mobile traffic is going to increase due to
the growth in mobile user-base. However the user-base seems to grow only by
88% by 2015. This means that the traffic growth is actually happening due to
increase in internet consumption per person. By 2015 this grows by 8 times!
HTML5 is likely to be one of the significant reasons behind this growth.