comScore found that apps made gains over browser usage on mobile devices in its latest report, a somewhat surprising finding considering the promise of HTML5.

In its latest mobile numbers, comScore reports that while apps and browser usage each made gains in its April numbers report, the two are still so close, it’s impossible to call either one a clear winner — and that is likely to continue to be the case for some time to come.

For all the talk that Apps are going to be replaced by HTML5 in the browser, so far at least, the numbers don’t support that. In fact, apps had a nice little lift in the most recent report moving from 48.6 in January to 50. 2 in April, a rise of 1.6 percentage points.

Interestingly, browser use increased as well, although it didn’t go up quite as much moving from 48.5 percent in January to 49.0 percent in April. So the two went from being separated by a thin .1 percentage points in January to a more significant 1.2 percent separation in April.

It looks like for the short term Apps are winning, at least by a little bit. Smart phones at this point are driven by their app stores. One of the major considerations when you buy a smart phone today is the quality of the app store behind it. It’s one of the reasons why Apple is doing so well selling iPhones and why the Lumia 900 hasn’t made much headway yet.

Apple came up with the first mobile app store and it’s still the most popular. Microsoft is trying to build up its inventory and its developer ecosystem, but it still has a long way to go just yet. Android is somewhere in the middle.

But will apps always be the driving factor in our smart phone purchase? Not if Mozilla has any say in the matter. Mozilla and its Boot to Gecko phone is bound and determined to standardize using HTML5. Although it may feel like any other conventional smart phone, their apps are all web-based. As a Mozilla represenative told me last winter at the CeBIT trade fair in Hanover, Germany; “the web is the platform.”

The beauty of this approach from a development perspective is that you don’t have to create multiple versions of a program for the different phone operating systems. Instead, you just have to build in tweaks for individual phones.

And Mozill’a sophistication around this is growing. One of the advantage of using apps is that you can tap into the phone’s hardware at the OS level including the accelerometer, camera, compass and so forth. But The Verge reports that Mozilla has developed what it calls a Web API, the purpose of which is to be able to tap into the phone hardware in a similar manner. This is a big step because it puts browser apps much more on par with OS ones.

Mozilla still plans to use an “app store” even though the apps will be based on web standards, rather than a particular phone OS.

As these kinds of tools develop, it would make sense for developers and users to have a standardized way of building and using apps. No system would likely allow you to create one code base because of differences in phone hardware, but when it’s based on standards it’s going to simplify everything.

Proprietary phone operating systems aren’t going anywhere just yet. They are lucrative and as these numbers show users are very comfortable using the app system, but perhaps over time as HTML5 begins to catch up with OS-level functionality, we will witness a transition to web-based apps. It could happen.

Photo by richiec on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Blackberry has faced years of steep and steady decline in US sales, but its CEO says there is more to the company than the US market. For its sake, there had better be.

It’s easy to just dismiss RIM as another company that missed the mark when the market changed. That’s because if you judge RIM by its US market share numbers, the situation is pretty dire indeed, but RIM is more than the US market, a fact RIM’s CEO made clear at a press conference this week at RIM’s Blackberry World Conference.

And as we wrote here earlier this week, the market share numbers in the US are seriously ugly. RIM has plunged from 42.1 percent as recently as February 2010 down to just 12.3 percent according to comScore’s most recent numbers. It’s hard to put a smiley face on numbers like that, but CEO Thorsten Heins gave it all he had (as well he should given the condition of his company).

Heins as you would expect, chose to accentuate the positive. As Wayne Rash reported on FierceMobileIT, he made it clear that RIM is doing well in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East selling feature phones, it wouldn’t think of marketing in North America and Western Europe.

That’s all well and good, but as Rash wrote in another piece, Blackberry needs a home run and it needs it badly.

But as Jason Perlow pointed out on ZDNet, it won’t matter how good Blackberry 10 is — because nobody is going to pay attention if the device doesn’t have apps. “Without the developers, you have no apps. With no apps, you can have the sexiest device in existence but nobody is going to buy the thing,” Perlow wrote.

Perlow says that the reason Apple is so successful is that it has come up with the perfect combination of sex appeal on the device side combined with what he calls the Superheroes, the developers who feed the app ecosystem.

And Perlow’s right, if there are no developers, the device will fail. When my wife was looking at a new smart phone recently, she flirted briefly with the Nokia Lumia 900, but in the end she went with an iPhone, partly because she owns other Apple devices, but partly because Microsoft’s app marketplace seemed a little barren.

That’s why apps matter a lot, so it was with some surprise that when I read an exclusive interview on FierceMobileIT with Andrew Bocking, RIM’s senior vice president of software product management, he was practically boasting about the apps for the upcoming release of Blackberry 10.  You may recall that there were a dearth of apps for the Blackberry Playbook tablet when it came out and that was one of the main reasons it has done so poorly.

Yet in this particularly interview, Bocking claimed QNX apps (the OS on the Playbook and upcoming Blackberry 10) had grown 240 percent this year, which certainly sounds impressive, but it’s hard to know, compared to what.  But Bocking didn’t stop there, he predicted that when Blackberry 10 launches, it would have a “substantial” number of apps. He wouldn’t put a figure on that, but he did say it would be more than what Windows had when it launched Windows Phone 7.

Not exactly the best comparison given what I said earlier about Windows Phone 7 apparent lack of apps, but if it’s more, it’s certainly a good start, especially if they are geared toward business users and not the Angry Birds variety.

One of the big issues with the Playbook was that it lacked a native email client, a strategic error so huge, it’s mind-boggling that RIM allowed the product to go to market without it.

That’s why I remain skeptical about RIM’s claims. They need to build buzz at any cost of course, and it would be silly to make claims then not be able to back them up, but RIM has been stumbling and bumbling for so long now, you’ll excuse me if I’m a bit cynical about its ability to deliver.

So I’ll file this one under I believe it when I see it. The rest is up to RIM to prove it’s more than those fading US sales.

Photo of the Blackberry 9380 Curve, courtesy of RIM.