Every company that's built a major mobile platform is trying to make their platform attractive for developers and a great experience for users. Since Apple started their hugely popular iPhone App Store (recently they've reached a milestone of 1.5 billion downloaded apps), RIM, Google, Nokia, Palm, and Microsoft have followed suit. But Google thinks that - similar to what is happening in the world of desktops - in the future, the actual platform won't matter much, because the web browser will become the dominant mobile platform.
As Google's Vic Gundotra, Engineering vice president and developer evangelist, said at the Mobilebeat conference in San Francisco on Thursday, “We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing.”
Google has certainly put their money where their mouth is when it comes to mobile versions of their web applications, such as Gmail, Google Calendar and others, most of which are available on all significant mobile platforms, and many have mobile browser-based versions. They also have their own mobile platform, Android; however, what Gundotra is saying means that having the best mobile browser will also play a significant part in the future of mobile computing.
Surprisingly, it seems that everyone besides Opera, which puts a great effort into development of Opera Mobile and Opera Mini and Apple with their open sourced WebKit was late to this game. Mozilla's Fennec is still in very early stages of development, while Microsoft's Internet Explorer was there from the very beginning, but it was - and still is - a bad mobile browser. Nokia's Symbian and Google's android use WebKit-powered browsers, but Gundotra's statement might mean that Google is finally preparing to launch Chrome for mobiles, and in this space, competition is more than welcome.