Our department fielded a question from a student recently about a Blackboard app for the iPhone. The student saw the app in the Apple App Store, but when she tried to use it, she found that it had to be enabled by the university, which it hadn’t been. Now, this is a bit of a moot point now since our university is transitioning from Blackboard to a new learning management system this year, but it got me thinking about the trend of apps for mobile platforms.

I got my first smartphone not too long ago—an Android device—and like anyone who gets a new smartphone, the first thing I did was download dozens and dozens of apps. How exciting it was! Games, maps, video services, content delivery! For the next few weeks I kept my eyes peeled on all of my most frequented websites. Does this site have an app? Does this company? Does this service?

But when the excitement wore off, I looked at some of the content-delivery apps and thought, why does this app exist? Couldn’t this information just be displayed in a mobile-friendly Web page?

Web pages—you remember those, right? The pages that display content by coding it into universally standard, non-proprietary HTML code. The pages that can be accessed from any computer or Web-enabled device with any browser and look and behave mostly the same. The pages that are not subject to any kind of approval process. I’ve seen an unfortunate trend lately where smartphone owners see their platform’s app store as their primary portal to the Internet and forget about the Web browser.

More and more people, especially young people, are carrying a smartphone, and I think that trend is only going to continue. And as online educators, it’s going to be hard for us to not accommodate the one Internet-enabled device that students have with them at all times. In the next couple of years, departments like mine are going to have to start testing how usable educational Web tools are on mobile devices before recommending them to faculty, considering potential challenges related to internet crime.

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But locking content into a specific platform with an app isn’t the way to go. It isn’t ethical, because we shouldn’t be telling students they’ll be at an advantage buying one brand over another. It isn’t practical, because we would have to keep up with all new developments in mobile operating systems. And it isn’t necessary, because these devices have perfectly capable Web browsers.

This isn’t to say apps don’t have their place—there are many things a Web page just isn’t capable of. But for content delivery, let’s spend our time developing mobile-friendly Web pages rather than making apps.