Check out Bruce Lawson’s interview with Alex Moore, executive director and co-founder of Open Web Advocacy. They run through the history of OWA, why OWA exists and what OWA fights for.

Bruce: So tell me, what is Open Web Advocacy and what is your fight?

Alex: So Open Web Advocacy is a non-profit, which is a fair competition for browsers, browser engines and web apps. Our primary goal is to get the web to be able to compete on mobile devices. I think if we look at the statistics now, the mobile web, even though on desktop, the web is extremely competitive. And by many stats is over 60% usage of all software on desktop. On mobile devices, it’s very small. Some quotes, even sub 13%. We think that’s down to a bunch of anti-competitive issues. Basically, we formed Open Web Advocacy to fight those issues and to try and bring the web back to mobile. [...]

Alex: 10 years of underinvestment later, and then now the gap is so big, and there’s no competition. There’s no viable web apps on iOS. It’s just so you suddenly realize just how critical competition is.

Bruce: Okay, but devil’s advocate here. Apple iPhones are what, 10% of the world’s phones. 90% are Android. I mean, give or take, but the lion’s share of the phones in the world are Android. So why should anybody care what Apple does? Why was what Apple doing affecting the whole industry?

Alex: Yeah, I think one of the things is iPhone utilization is very different country by country. In fact, for example, like in Australia, I think iPhones are actually over 50% usage. Same in Japan. Japan is a very iPhone-heavy country. What you’ll find is the wealthier the country, the more iPhones there are. The other problem is the rich customers are almost overwhelmingly pushed towards iOS, and that also shows up in what their expenditure is, and what they’re willing to spend on products and software.

And then the thing is, the market that we need to look at is, although we’re really focused on consumers, the market we need to look at is businesses. The thing is, if you’re a software company and you’re developing a piece of software for a client, or even if you’re producing software for your company, it’s very likely your boss is going to have an iPhone. And if not, he’s still going to want to target those customers first. And if you’re coming to your boss and you say, look, and you’re trying to come up with the pros and cons for building a web app, versus the pros and cons of building a native app, if you come to the conclusion that’s not going to work properly on an iPhone, then they’re going to go to it, they’re just going to build a native app. And then if they build a native app on iOS, it’s kind of like, well, Do we build a web app on Android? Alex Moore and Bruce Lawson
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Be sure to check out the full interview. Transcript available here.