The landscape for mobile application development has changed enormously. The entry of Web 2.0 companies means instead of consolidation, operators are now facing increasing fragmentation. The challenge for operators is how to manage this diversity from their own perspective. Which direction will offer the greatest chance of consumer adoption of mobile apps?
The current situation with mobile application development has been compared to the early days of computer gaming. Then, developers, faced with a multitude of choices, developed for the biggest selling devices or specialised on one particular vendor. At that time, the Japanese attempted to create a standard for mobile games, MSX, which failed. As Bill Weinberg, general manager with the Linux Phone Standards Forum, points out, this plethora of choice is an unnatural situation for the cellular world. The whole industry has been based on standards like GSM and GPRS. He argues that standardisation in mobile apps, if it occurs at all, will centre around software platforms.
Establishing exactly which platforms existing players are developing for and which they will develop for in the future isn't an easy task. In Europe, the main focus has been on two operating systems – Windows Mobile and Symbian – whereas Palm and Brew have proved popular in the US and Linux has made some impact in Asia Pacific. The difference, Weinberg maintains, is that Microsoft and Symbian offer very different value propositions. "Microsoft promotes Windows Mobile not just on its own merits, but as one end of a platform continuum that spans from server to desktop to embedded," he observed. "Conversely, the Symbian OS is an isolated platform but the company promotes it as the 'best-in-class' mobile OS. Both companies have strong developer communities – Microsoft claims to have over 1,800 apps that can run on Windows Mobile. They both have published strong APIs that aid developers in creating new apps."
Asked whether the latest initiatives by the Web 2.0 players can disrupt the existing OS duopoly, Paul Goode, senior analyst with researchers, M:Metrics, argued that, "The arrival of the Android / Open Handset Alliance is important, but is of little commercial interest for at least the next five years." He maintains that it takes a long time to roll out new platforms into the hands of consumers. "Microsoft launched Windows CE ten years ago but it still has an under two per cent market share in the UK of installed base. Indeed, smartphones as a whole only have just over 10 per cent," Goode said.
Java
Consequently those aiming to develop a mobile application for the mass market have followed another direction – Java. According to Tom Godber, founder of specialist Mobile apps developer, Masabi, "Native OS apps were stillborn; AJAX is fundamentally wrong for mobile, so – despite its flaws – Java is the only viable option for advanced clients in the next three to five years." Bill Weinberg agrees. "Today the vast majority of phone apps are written in Java (J2ME and MID-P)," he says. "Actually, operators like NTT DoCoMo, Sprint, and Vodaphone all have their own developer programmes, but they mostly concentrate on Java." The catch is that Java itself is extremely fragmented. As Tony Cripps, a senior analyst with Ovum, observed, "Java certainly failed to live up to its promise [write once, run anywhere] in the mobile world." Similarly, "Even where there is a common 'standard', such as J2ME, the implementations are vastly different across manufacturers and often incompatible," argued John Chasey, CEO with software house, Metismo.
Linux
Few believe that even if Java has so far failed the mobile industry, Linux can come to the rescue. "As for the various Linux initiatives – such as LiMo and Android – there remains a large degree of fragmentation," Geoff Blaber, senior analyst with CCS Insight, commented. "The fact remains that we're yet to see a commercially successful Linux based platform in Europe. We'll probably see a small number of devices based on LiMo and Android this year [2008] but it will be sometime before we see a vibrant developer community for Linux."
Flash
One development environment which was mentioned frequently to Mobile Europe was Adobe's Flash. The argument here is that Flash already has a very strong following amongst those developing for the Web and that this great pool of expertise could be harnessed to create mobile applications. There is, of course a mobile version of Flash – namely, Flash Lite. However, Masabi's Tom Godber isn't convinced that it will provide the answer for creating mobile apps. "Flash Lite is proving that any platform that can reach a mainstream user base will fragment. Despite having less power and fewer units shipped than Java, it has multiple incarnations and many handset-specific bugs, let alone the inescapable form factor issues." Tony Cripps observed that Microsoft has taken the whole challenge presented by Flash very seriously and produced its own alternative – Silverlight. This was released back in September 2007 for the Web community. Microsoft's Derek Snyder was unable to confirm just how soon we might see a mobile version of Silverlight. However, he did confirm that Silverlight was shown working on a standard Windows Mobile [6.0] handset by Microsoft at a developer conference. Reports appear to confirm that it was working well, so there shouldn't be too long a wait.
Thought leader
Another force to be reckoned with is Apple with its iPhone. Despite worldwide sales of four million units in 200 days, the iPhone is influencing mobile software way beyond its actual installed base. James Tagg, CEO with mobile VoIP provider, Truphone, described Apple as the "thought leader" in the mobile apps space. The same influence was observed by Shlomo Wolfman, COO with software house, Starhome. He claimed that the Windows Mobile developer community has recently increased its output – chiefly by imitating features offered by the iPhone and then translating them into Windows Mobile apps. Significantly, Derek Snyder, product manager for mobile communications with Microsoft, questioned just how effective Apple's approach was. If the iPhone really had succeeded in bringing the Web 2.0 to mobile phones, then why were web designers declaring that their sites had been 'optimised' for the iPhone, he asked?
Despite all competition, in terms of a winner in the mobile apps space, it is probably Nokia that currently dominates. According to Geoff Blaber, "From a an open platform perspective, [the Nokia] Series 60 is by far the most dominant platform in terms of volume, accounting for over 60 per cent of the European market." He also notes that Nokia's development community, Forum Nokia, is "a huge and highly comprehensive developer support program which has been central to driving growth of the Series 60 eco-system." So Symbian and Nokia could be viewed as the current market leaders. There is one drawback, though. Nokia has begun to develop its own web services under the Ovi banner and Blaber believes this could deter some Web 2.0 developers given that a potential conflict of interest exists.
Yahoo! Go
Generally speaking the arrival of Web 2.0 giant, Google, with a version of Linux in the shape of Android is viewed as increasing the fragmentation of the Linux developer community. "We'll probably see a small number of devices based on LiMo and Android this year but it will be sometime before we see a vibrant developer community for Linux," Geoff Blaber believes. "Portability of applications between platforms remains a big problem which inhibits growth of the developer community for mobile Linux." So what has attracted the fiercest criticism is Yahoo!'s claims that its 'Go' will allow third party developers to write applications that will run on a wide variety of mobile devices. Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO of mobile email specialist, Synchronica, commented, "Once again we see a big vendor heralding an 'open' mobile platform which is, in fact, proprietary technology that does not support common industry standards such as push IMAP and SyncML." Brinkschulte added, "In addition, Go mobile technology takes over the user interface of the device rather than working with the manufacturers' firmware." He therefore predicts that Go will meet with considerable resistance from the mobile handset manufacturers themselves.
The entry of web 2.0 players into mobile is not a completely negative event, According to Paul Goode, the easy viral success of Web or PC based applications is hard to replicate in the mobile space. That viral capability increases the power of the consumer, of course. Tony Cripps also believes that 'widgets' make more sense in the mobile sector than they actually do on the computer desktop. Widgets actually require a small amount of processing power on the host device and leave the real processing to Web based servers.
Pulling the strings
Handset manufacturers aren't the only players seen as influencing the mobile apps market. Bill Weinberg feels that reference designs from handset chip suppliers and not the 'standard' commercial versions of software that will often form the basis for new mobile apps. Nonetheless, the vast majority of observers say that it is the mobile operators who are calling the shots in specifying mobile apps. There has, however, been a subtle move towards consumer choice and influence. Geoff Blaber, for example, observes that, "Windows Mobile has to date remained predominantly business orientated from an applications perspective although this is beginning to change as vendors such as HTC and operators like Vodafone utilise Windows Mobile in more of a consumer centric setting."
Solution
If there's no clear winner as the leading software development platform, then one answer for network operators is to specify apps that can run in multiple environments. "Many developers have created their own middleware to abstract the differing handset issues on Java," John Chasey explained. "Metismo's particular version of middleware, called BedRock, goes a step further and as well as handling all the J2ME handsets it can cross-compile from Java to C and produce builds for Symbian, Brew, and even Flash." According to Ovum's Tony Cripps, there are niche companies which specialise in taking the pain out of developing mobile apps for Java enabled handsets. Providers such as Tierra Wireless in Canada can take an existing Java application and re-specify it so that it runs properly against its own database of Java handset capabilities.
Fragmentation
The fragmentation within the mobile apps development community is something of a double-edged sword for network operators. "In their struggle against being reduced to pipes of various girth, operators take pains to differentiate along lines that can encourage fragmentation," says Bill Weinberg. Conversely, as James Tagg observed, mobile apps developers are forced by this very fragmentation to spend out millions on multiple versions of their client software just to keep all the operators happy. Without fragmentation that money could be spent usefully elsewhere.