Opera’s First iPhone App
The English National Opera announced the launch of “Opera’s first iPhone app” which allows users to overview the forthcoming ENO season, listen to audio clips from productions and watch filmed interviews with members of the cast and creative teams.
Let me start by saying I think the ENO iPhone app is very cool. I’ve been hearing a lot about arts orgs. launching iPhone apps rather than investing in creating mobile enabled sites. I question the decision to spend money serving only those with iPhone. You are missing all patrons and audience members with Blackberrys, Androids and other mobile devices with web browsers. Yes, there is lots of buzz and hype around the iPhone and App store but given limited investment dollars for these programs doesn’t it make more sense to build a web-enabled site so all patrons can have a positive mobile web browsing experience? Take a look at this site where you can enter the web address of your site and see how it looks in a mobile web browser. Try it with ENO’s site “www.eno.org.” It would be very hard to navigate around that on a small mobile browser. Again, I think the iPhone app ENO built is fantastic but I wonder if investing those dollars in building a mobile enabled site would have been money better spent. What do you think?
