MobiUs is Here; the World of Web Apps will Never be the Same

Until now, Web apps and websites have had limited capabilities, technically incapable of utilizing the great features that made smartphones so popular: gravity sensing, accelerometer, GPS, camera, sound and vibration, file system, and more. MobiUs integrates powerful APIs from PhoneGap and appMobi to give Web apps the same performance, look and feel as native apps. HTML5 Offline Caching lets MobiUs run Web apps even when network connectivity is unavailable. Once a Web app is bookmarked in MobiUs, the app is stored on the smartphone, so it loads instantly and can run with or without Internet connectivity, just like a native app.



MobiUs represents the state of the art in mobile browsing technology, with an optimized user experience that leverages new capabilities enabled by the emerging HTML5 standard, plus enhanced capabilities engineered by appMobi. Because gameplay accounts for a large percentage of the time people spend with their smartphones, appMobi has embedded its DirectCanvas HTML5 game acceleration technology within MobiUs. DirectCanvas supercharges the performance of a game’s physics calculation and screen drawing by an astounding 500 percent, making Web games played via MobiUs as fast and responsive as native app games.



“MobiUs is huge, with the power to disrupt everything you know about mobile apps, where you get them and how developers and publishers benefit from them,” says Sam Abadir, appMobi CTO. “What has been particularly exciting for us is the early interest in MobiUs from some of our game developer customers. Game developers always push technology to the absolute edge of its limitations in order to make entertaining, thrilling and compelling games, and they are finding the combination of MobiUs and appMobi’s GameDev XDK give them performance up to and even beyond the speed and capabilities of Adobe Flash.”



Key features of MobiUs include:



Mobile-optimized Web app caching for instant access to Web apps even when the device isn’t connected



DirectCanvas for supercharged game speed and performance



Web-based Push notifications for user engagement



Built-in eCommerce capability through appMobi’s 1Touch digital wallet technology



Mobile-optimized tabbed browsing



Full screen browsing



Orientation locking



In-app access to device hardware functionalities such as the accelerometer, GPS, compass, vibration, microphone, camera and more.



If mobile users want to harness the power of MobiUs while continuing to use their favorite browser, they can. To invoke MobiUs, mobile app developers simply add an HTML tag to their Web app hyperlinks which allows their Web apps to run on a user's device through any mobile browser.

Increasingly, smartphone apps utilize push notifications to send messages to users about something new that requires their attention. MobiUs is the first smartphone browser to enable push notifications for HTML5, giving Web apps the power of push notifications not just in the form of familiar text notifications, but with full multimedia messages powered by HTML5 that can include text, animations, audio and video messages.



MobiUs also includes appMobi’s breakthrough 1Touch digital wallet technology, allowing developers to include a single click payment process within their Web apps. 1Touch users avoid the privacy and security risks associated with storing personal financial information like credit card numbers and addresses in large, at-risk databases in the cloud, susceptible to massive hacks and security breaches. Instead, 1Touch securely stores encrypted credit card information on the device, only decrypted when purchases are made.



The MobiUs browser makes the mobile Web far more immersive by allowing Web developers to access all of the functions that native apps can access, effectively creating the performance of a native app in a mobile website. Viewed in MobiUs, mobile sites are able to make use of device functionalities such as the accelerometer, GPS, compass, vibration, microphone, camera and more.

“With MobiUs on the scene, the ‘walled garden’ is now a public space,” says Abadir. “There are many good reasons why app publishers might still want to use the walled garden app stores, but for the first time, MobiUs gives them a real choice between distributing by app store or the open Web. The appMobi platform and MobiUs allow any HTML5 developer to create and market mobile apps on the open Web that are indistinguishable from native apps in performance and functionality. MobiUs truly empowers Web apps and opens up the entire World Wide Web as the new app store.”