I recently read this article Google: Bad User Experience For Mobile Users May Lead To Ranking Issues where an example of responsive / mobile optimized web site is shown side by side with its desktop version and continue to wonder the following:
do people really want mobile versions of websites which are completely different from their desktop counterpart?
See the example below, the mobile main page has practically no text content and seems more of an app than a website, do users really want that? I usually ignore mobile versions of websites when I can, if they ask me to install the mobile version on the phone I reject and like to zoom and pinch on the desktop version from the increasingly bigger screens and screen resolutions of smartphones.
Is it me only?
To me mobile optimized web sites should simply be about making menus accessible, input boxes accessible, parts of the website clickable etc etc. not about creating dumbed down versions (and completely different ones) from desktop versions.
Even stacking vertically content and changing its order just to fit a smaller screen is a little puzzling to me, that's not consistent for me and using desktop and mobile is basically using two different versions of the website.
The idea, by the way, of proposing an app when a user clicks a page from a smartphone to use instead of browsing with his browser seems again odd to me. If I want an app instead of browsing I go to the app store but if I'm good navigating with the browser why nag me continusouly (http://vanillaforums.org/discussions was a good example but they apparently changed this, if anyone has an example of this)