All that work on the tablet app is looking pretty silly now

The iPad was supposed to change everything. Especially magazines. But now people are seriously wondering if the short-lived era of the tablet is over.

Three years ago, could you have imagined someone calling tablet development old news? We might be there.

Tablet sales have tanked, and smart phones are getting better all the time. They’re also getting larger. Google is pushing all websites to be mobile friendly, so design for the smart phone is only going to get better as resources are thrown that direction.

The tablet seems to be caught in a strange in-between world. During the early days of the alleged tablet revolution, people were redesigning for that size screen, but now … the desktop version of a site usually works well enough on the tablet, so design resources are turning to mobile.

How does this affect publishing?

In my opinion it’s not very nice to read on a smart phone, but a lot of people do. And as mobile designs get better, more and more will.

The smart phone is ridiculously convenient, and who wants to carry around a smartphone and a Kindle or tablet? People will be looking for ways to make reading on the smartphone work.

But even with a very large mobile phone, you can’t do much of a flashy magazine app on the thing.

Displaying a magazine on a tablet requires some rejiggering of the design, but displaying a magazine on a smart phone is going to require wholesale re-thinking.

This is going to be the next “spend lots of money here” temptation for magazine publishers. So … what should they do?

I thought most of the spending on tablet apps was a waste of time, and I think the surprisingly lame sales of magazine content on tablets shows that I was generally right. But I think optimizing content for smart phones is a good idea.

The secret is going to be keeping it simple, which means you can’t put a designer in charge. Designers will want to do cool things and make the product look artsy.

Artsy is fine, so long as it’s also functional. But functional has to come first.

But this is just my guess. Only time will tell. Technology is changing so fast these days, maybe the smart phone will have an even shorter life than the tablet.