Maintaining support in multiple platforms
Mobile phones February 10th, 2009Mobile applications, I believe, will be the key driver of mobile services usage in ‘09 and ‘10. The only issue I have is the fragmentation of platforms on the market and no reverse compatibility.
Let’s recap what we have:
- Java
- Symbian (Java compatible)
- Windows Mobile
- iPhone
- Android
- Palm
The well-known issue with Java is, that it is not compatible across series, thus creating applications for it is very costly - and creating frameworks on the memory limitations is nearly impossible. So what’s next? Will the world fragment to iPhone experts, Android experts, and JAVA experts, and only some of the biggest guys will have the guts and budgets to develop on all platforms? Well, we have seen what that has done to EA Mobile (hundreds of millions loss last year), who tried. But some are succeeding (Gameloft with iPhone / Symbian / Java /…).
Also, there is not a single delivery platform I would know of that would support all of these platforms at once, which is another barrier for example for mobile operators, which might be afraid phones like iPhone and Android are going to take their premium revenue away. This is definitely something worth thinking about.
Tags: mobile fragmentation, mobile platform diversification, mobile platform fragmentation
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February 10th, 2009 at 11:12 am
We should realize that Flash is available on about a billion mobile devices (10^9) all over the world as a run-time environment.
February 10th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Vojtech: Yeah, but flash is unusable for proffesional applications or anything really that “serious”. Also the coverage in Europe is really off.
Where did you get the 1 billion figure? Is that a claim, or something that they have analyzed the handsets that flash WAS in?
Don’t forget that there are mobile operators in the world - mobile operators have taken flash enabled handsets, and taken the flash off these handsets, as they perceived it as a threat. So the official license numbers might be one thing, but reality is another.