I was asked yesterday whether my company would consider creating an application for the iPad. Our flagship application is a product that produces insurance rates for an insurance agent that they can easily compare and provide to a customer looking for insurance. It is called a comparative rater. Information is entered once about a person including their cars or their home and then insurance quotes are produced from potentially hundreds of companies.
But, I digress. Back to the question. Would we produce an application like this for a mobile device? Our application relies on really heavy data entry. Each year, in fact, insurance companies seem to need additional information in order generate quotes. The best way to navigate through such a set of requirements (at least right now) is a keyboard and mouse. In addition, our comparative rating ecosystem relies upon integration with other systems to exchange data. Many of those do not, and will not live on a mobile platform because they are designed for a local workgroup environment. Lastly, in order to perform actions like verifying an address, looking up a car by a VIN and producing and submitting rates to a carrier, you need solid Internet connectivity.
Certainly, the latter issue seems to less and less of an issue as our wireless networks mature, but my final reason for not building an app for that? If you need portability now, you can have it. A netbook with a data plan or a laptop tethered to smartphone or an aircard gets the job done right now. You keep all the functionality of the current products that are in your life - you just get to take it with you. Our product costs do not go up and everyone's life stay simpler.
That's not to say that we aren't looking at ways to move our solutions to the cloud or provide read-only access for mobile devices. It's just that the mix of functionality and productivity in our current solutions are not directly a good fit for these emerging platforms. We'll be keeping a close eye on them though.
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