Here is an overview of how publishers are re-evaluating their approach to apps, followed by three examples of the new app economy in action.

Getting past the love/hate view of apps

To begin, it’s helpful to recall why apps became so contentious in the first place: they were supposed to be a way for publishers to replicate the glory days of print but with a digital twist. The idea was to deliver pretty layouts plus interactive razzle-dazzle to a captive audience who would read the content (and ads!) just like a magazine or newspaper. This promise, though, fell far short as Jason Pontin of MIT’s Tech Review described with anguished honesty in May.

Pontin explained how his publication expended innumerable staff hours plus $124,000 on outside costs to build apps that yielded a grand total of 353 iPad subscriptions. In doing so, he discovered that app building was not a one-off process but a never-ending struggle to stretch and shape the app across different devices, operating systems and updates. Pontin also came to question the basic premise of a publishers’ app. Specifically, why would readers want to read inside a box that cut them off from the “linky-ness” of the rest of the web?

Pontin, who has since made good on his vow to yank his apps from the Apple store, makes a strong case. So what’s changed since then? A couple of things.

The first is cost. Today, there are a growing number of companies offering off-the-shelf app solutions that let publishers enjoy pretty, serviceable apps on the cheap. These apps are not as “linky” as a web page but do come with the sharing features that are essential in the age of social media. These publishing options mean app-making is no longer the high stress, budget-busting process it was before.

The second, and more profound change, comes in how publishers have come to think about apps in the first place. Today, most publishers accept they need an app. As an Economist executive noted at Business Insider’s Ignition conference this month, his magazine’s strategy is simply to be where the reader is — which includes inside app stores and on the display of a smartphone or tablet. But the choice of what type of app to put there will vary widely depending on the publication.

For news-intense digital publishers that offer lots of links and reader interaction, an app can simply be a proxy for their mobile website. More pensive publications, on the other hand, may decide to invest a little more on a boutique app from a speciality shop. Meanwhile, legacy publishers can turn to app makers to help them slap social or shopping features onto their traditional layouts.

The point is that publishers no longer face the hard choice between betting the farm on expensive apps or risking being left out of the digital future. Instead, apps have become just one more tool of distribution available in an ever-growing number of shapes, sizes and prices.

Example 1: A pretty container for The Awl

The Awl is a literary, cultural and news site whose motto is “be less stupid.” It caters to a young, technophilic audience but is still a shoestring operation with little cash for expensive bells and whistles. But that didn’t stop it from developing a personalized app.

Turning to a New York start-up, 29th Street Publishing, The Awl made an app called the Weekend Companion that delivers five new articles to readers’ iPhone or iPad each week. The app’s appeal is that it curates a small set of articles and presents them in a pretty, immersive layout. The articles download quickly and are ready for reading on a train ride or a rainy morning in bed. While the Awl app has discreet tools to share stories by email or text, the overall idea is not interaction but a reflexive, book-like experience.

“We put content front and center not the app,” said 29th Street Publishing CEO, David Jacobs in a phone interview. The company is working with a dozen or so publishers, including Gothamist, and its pricing models include both fees (one report cites $20,000) and revenue sharing.

Jacobs said apps can provide a better media experience than the web but that he doesn’t perceive conflict between the two platforms; rather, he thinks publishers should be on both. He added that so-called “sub-compact” publishing models like 29th Street and Marco Arment’s The Magazine are best suited for light-weigh text-focused publications.

“You can’t really have a sub-compact fashion magazine,” he noted.

Example 2: Off-the-shelf content shovels for magazines

Sub-compact publishing is a hot topic but it’s not a realistic option for publishers that want an app to mimic the look and feel of a glossy magazine. In the past, these publishers had to build individualized apps at great expense but now they can turn to off-the-shelf solutions.

One popular option is MAZ, a company that provides apps and mobile service for titles like Inc and Bust for $299 a month plus 20 cents per download. According to founder Paul Canetti, MAZ lets editors and reporters take control of the mobile publishing process without having to learn finicky coding techniques. It’s a logical division of labor, in other words.

“I’ve never met a print publisher who made their own layout software or built a printing press — why expect it with apps?” Canetti said in an interview. He added that his clients’ apps were ready the moment Apple introduced its new retina display iPad while the venerable New Yorker struggled to update its house-built app.

MAZ apps also let publishers customize stories with shopping and social buttons. This means readers can buy things they see in an issue or cut out pictures and share them on Pinterest.

The MAZ apps rely on publishers uploading PDF’s so they are best suited to publications that want to reproduce their distinctive print layouts online. Meanwhile, publishers that want a more comprehensive white-label solution may look to companies like Polar Mobile which help sling mobile content across different forums, including apps.

In the long run, the off-the-shelf products may present lock-in risks but, as Canetti notes, the same risk applies to choosing a content manage system. “Publishers trust us not to take advantage of them,” he said.

The bottom line here is that, as external app solutions become more numerous and versatile, the pressure on publishers to create elaborate apps for themselves will diminish.

Example 3: Apps are just a box for the web

For some types of publishers, the rapid evolution of mobile websites has nearly obviated the need for apps altogether. The most prominent example is the Financial Times which grew fed up with Apple’s pricing practices and pulled out of the app store altogether this summer. The strategy appears to be working.

FT.com’s Managing Director Rob Grimshaw told a Business Insider conference this month that traffic on iOS devices was up 70 percent since the FT left the app store, and suggested company is not looking back.

Should everyone else follow suit? Once it again, it depends on the publication. For publications like GigaOM that embody the hyper-connectedness of the web, a mobile site is the best way to deliver that experience. It is perhaps also telling that popular tech aggregator Techmeme doesn’t have an app at all.

But even for publishers that are betting on the mobile web over apps, it doesn’t hurt to have an app all the same for readers who like the idea of a publication’s icon appearing on their devices. That’s why publishers like the FT and GigaOM offer apps that largely mirror their mobile sites but that require little in the way of development costs.

(Image by Everett Collection via Shutterstock)

MediaEverywhere provides publishers with an SDK based on HTML5 that allows them to create custom mobile websites in a short period of time but also re-use the work for native apps for smartphones and tablets. The SDK  allows publishers to control the look of their content while easily distributing it to multiple devices in a cost-effective way.

HTML5 has been hyped as a tool to help developers build once and reach mobile browsers and apps. But the technology hasn’t developed as fast as proponents would have liked, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who admitted that the company’s reliance on HTML5 was its biggest mistake. So why does it make sense for MediaEverywhere?

CEO Kunal Gupta told me Polar Mobile did a lot of optimization to its SDK to improve performance including a lot of caching on the device and a single-page architecture. And he said he created the tool specifically for publishers to help them present articles, blogs, photo galleries and multimedia content. Polar Mobile has also integrated support for third-party ads and also handles Google Analytics and Adobe Omniture for analytics.

He said publishers are finding that the revenue they’re currently making on mobile doesn’t justify the heavy price tag of dedicated native apps, which also take a long time to develop. And he said mobile consumption is increasingly moving to the web browser. Pew reported earlier this month that 60 perecnt of tablet news users rely on their browser to get news on their tablet, compared to 23 percent that mostly use apps. With a tool like MediaEverywhere that’s optimized for media publishers, Gupta believes brands have a way to be on all devices quickly without paying a heavy price.

“The mobile economy isn’t working today. Publishers are spending too much to pay for audiences and advertisers haven’t kept up with the audience,” said Gupta.

Gupta said more publishers will be coming on board soon including some of Polar Mobile’s more than 400 existing media clients. If that happens, that should validate Polar Media’s bet on MediaEverywhere. The company raised $6 million in January to build out the product.

Polar also today released some numbers that attests to the growth of the apps economy — and to its own business. It says that it currently works with some 380 media brands in 12 countries. It has served 1.6 billion page views for some 11 million users to-date across the many apps that it has produced.

The $6 million round was led by Georgian Partners and takes the total invested in the company to $9 million, with the previous $3 million coming from private investors.

Georgian, which based in Toronto like Polar, has a portfolio that includes another app developer, Kony Solutions, as well as a number of other platform-based B2B digital media startups. (Two others include Shopify and Terapeak, which are used by retail e-commerce companies.)

Meanwhile, the new product line, branded MediaEverywhere, effectively does what it says on the label: it is HTML-5 based and is aimed at letting publishers make apps that can get used on different platforms and devices — not just mobiles and tablets but also desktop computers, and not just native apps but web browsers, too.

Working across different platforms is a trend we’ve seem among other app developers — but given the client line-up that Polar already has, this is a significant sign of how that kind of strategic view is taking shape among publishers investing in apps. Research from GfK last year showed that some 11 percent of magazine views are now digital-only — a number that is on the rise, with publishers all making sure that they will be along for the ride.

It’s worth pointing out that Polar already offered a degree of cross-platform development before today: its SmartTM product lets content be formatted for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, PlayBook, Windows Phone and Nokia’s Symbian platform; however now web apps are being added into the mix.

Kunal Gupta, the CEO of Polar, tells paidContent that is has some publishers already on the platform but is not announcing any client names just yet.

Some publishers — notably the FT — are buying up/bringing in-house their third-party developers in order to have a better grip on how they develop their apps, and to make sure that they continue to have an edge on their competitors. That presents an interesting challenge for a third-party company like Polar: will it, too, eventually get swallowed up by one of its customers, or will it find it hard in the longer term to attract business from the big-name publishers who will continue to invest in having that expertise in-house?

Gupta tells paidContent that the company is more than happy to stay independent for now.

China Mobile. Last week, Nokia said that it planned to put more effort on operator partnerships — rather than direct sales — in its fightback strategy in the U.S. It looks like this might also be the template in other markets, too — specifically China, where according to IDG News EVP of sales Colin Giles, who is based there, announced that the company would be partnering with China Mobile to sell its new Windows Phone handsets.

This is the first operator partnership that Nokia has announced for the devices — and going to China first is a sign of where the company wants to focus, and where it knows it will have to work hard to maintain its market share in the face of competition from Android handset makers and Apple (NSDQ: AAPL).

This move follows announcements earlier this year from Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) that it would be providing Chinese language support as part of its Mango update to the OS. The devices will be running on the TD-SCDMA standard, a homegrown 3G standard that is not compatible with those used in Europe and the U.S.

Polar Mobile. This deal, announced today, is about adding more content to the Nokia’s new platform. Today, the Canada-based app developers Polar Mobile announced that it has signed a deal to distribute 300 of its apps — it has developed around 1,200 for a range of publishers, including several magazines from the Conde Nast stable, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Time (NYSE: TWX) and the Shanghai Daily — for Nokia’s new Windows Phone devices, as well as its Symbian and MeeGo N9 handsets. It’s a small step, but one in the right direction as the company looks to lure users to its platform away from app-rich Android and iOS platforms.

Barcelona. Possibly less significant but another sign of the company’s intent to come out fighting with its new strategy… Nokia has always had a presence at the Mobile World Congress, but for the past couple of years a lot of that has been focused off-site. This year, the company is returning to the main event. This coming February, the company will be exhibiting on the main show floor, with a mammoth stand not in one of the bigger halls of vendors and handset makers but at App Planet. (Last year, both HP (NYSE: HPQ) and RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) exhibited in this hall; other handset makers were based at the more central exhibition spaces. Nokia’s only stand presence was a smallish affair dedicated to Qt.)

According to Nokia spokesman Mark Squires, Nokia’s CEO, Stephen Elop, will also keynote at the 2012 event. In 2011, he made no less than three public appearances, although none of them an actual keynote: once the night before the show began to an audience of journalists; once as a surprise guest of Steve Ballmer; and once finally in his own slot on the main stage.

Polar Mobile, which has developed apps for publishers such as Time Inc. (NYSE: TWX), Conde Nast, CBS (NYSE: CBS) Sports and Sports Illustrated, says that it will be porting at least 80 of its current catalog of 750 apps into Intel AppUp.

Kunal Gupta, the CEO of Polar Mobile, tells mocoNews that the content is specifically intended for tablets running on the MeeGo OS, not for smartphones. Polar already provides content for iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone.

The news comes one day after Nokia finally unveiled its first MeeGo handset, the N9 smartphone. But while there have been a lot of positive words about that handset, many believe it might end up being Nokia’s one and only shot: originally the company had intended to develop handsets and tablets on the platform — which was jointly developed by Nokia and Intel (NSDQ: INTC). But Nokia has more recently distanced itself from MeeGo as it looks to shift more of its handsets to the Windows Phone platform from Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT).

A graphic leaked yesterday seemed to indicate an ever-shrinking commitment to the platform from Nokia.

Meanwhile, there has been precious little MeeGo device news up to now — and almost nothing about tablets. The most notable gadget, apart from the N9, has been the Acer Iconia 500 tablet that appeared at Computex in May 2011 (that’s the grainy picture here). There have also been rumors that LG and ZTE are interested in the platform, but nothing concrete.

This announcement from Polar could be an indication that Intel might be gearing up — or at least lobbying OEMs — for something more.