Why we don't develop for platforms other than iPhone
thisismobility.com
thisismobility.com
> Whilst I don’t believe that you’re blinded by iPhone-lurve, it’s not the only game in town. There are profitable businesses running across other devices, and have been for years....
I think it's a bit of a USA vs Rest of the World thing. For the US (and specifically Silicon Valley) to suddenly wake up to the potential of mobile and then decide that they are the only game in town and nothing else of value exists is a bit off.
In 2004, I was working as a graphics artist for a Finnish startup that was in the business of making Java games for phones. The company had started with three founders two years earlier, and when I got there, they employed over 30 people and kept growing. They had struck deals with operators across Europe, and game sales were taking off in a serious way. (Ordinary people were buying millions of units of over-the-air distributed Java software for phones already in 2004 -- but I guess those that were successful in this market were not terribly interested in attracting competitors by making a lot of noise about it.)
The games were good enough that everybody could be proud of the work. On the best phones, the graphics and sound quality was on the level of Amiga or 386+VGA PCs. But more importantly, the games scaled down graciously to the most primitive color-screen phones with resolutions circa 128*80 pixels: thanks to a well-thought out set of APIs, an asset workflow designed for scalability and an extensive database of device capabilities, games could be easily built for dozens of devices.
I ended up leaving that job fairly quickly because I figured out I'd rather be pushing around millions of pixels on the GPU with code, rather than pushing around individual pixels in Photoshop manually. But I know the company was acquired by a large American corporation not long after, and I think the founders ended up very well rewarded for having created that rare combination of technical competence (the APIs and development process), marketing (the relationships with international operators) and artistic integrity (the games looked good and played well).
If anyone is interested on their approach, lecture slides are available at http://www.cs.tut.fi/kurssit/OHJ-3200/luennot/luennot2008/Oh...
Also, people with iPhones are people with money. Not a bad demographic to develop for.
Salient comment from Jason Devitt of SkyDeck.com (proprietor of cloud-based mirror of your mobile phone's information)
> Downloading applications for a Nokia phone is not obvious, not easy, and often no fun at all. It’s confined to people who in your words are ‘more tech-savvy’ and ‘more likely to try things out.’
>I have many friends whom I do not consider ‘tech savvy’ and who never downloaded an application for a mobile phone in their lives - until they bought an iPhone.
Nokia VP New Markets Anssi Vanjoki talking about their Ovi store. It will have a feature the iPhone App Store could use/implement.
>It’s different from other stores because of its relevance engine. It learns from your own use, the location where you are, and your interaction with your friends. You will not get tens of thousands of crap applications. You will get what is relevant to you.
http://venturebeat.com/2009/04/02/nokia-aims-to-prove-there-...
And while at present, Android is exclusive to (the pretty poor in the UK) T-Mobile, any network can commission some Far East handset maker (HTC, Huawei etc) to make them an Android device.
Potentially, we have the situation we've had in desktop computing for years; anyone can put together a PC and stick Windows or Linux on it, only Apple can make a Mac. It'll be interesting to see which strategy wins out in mobile.
(I had a Symbian device for years. Never again. I'm waiting for Android-powered phones to become widespread then switching.)
This isn't like the desktop computing world, where even a low-end Dell box will run most software people care about; the low end for mobile devices consists of millions of ludicrously-underpowered handsets. Telcos love these because they're incredibly cheap (see: "sign up for a family plan and get five phones free!"). But from a developer's perspective, these devices are a terrible platform: even if you write an application that can run on a low-end handset, you probably can't turn a profit from it since the prospective customer is someone who, by definition, is willing to forego useful/interesting features to save a bit of cash.
So any successful business around Android applications will probably have to target the higher end of the market. But that end of the market is:
1. At a price point -- in terms of handsets and voice/data plans -- where people start to think "if I'm already paying this much, why not just go ahead and get an iPhone?", and
2. So much smaller in terms of handset and carrier choice that the average person probably won't be swayed by arguments about handset and carrier choice.
And that's without getting into the problem of writing applications which can run across even the limited spectrum of higher-end handsets: maybe you've got a touch screen and maybe you don't, maybe you've got on-board wifi and maybe you don't, etc.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/mar/13/iphone...
In Q4 2008 Apple sold 4.1m iPhones (10.7% of the smartphone market), and Google is estimated to have sold 0.64m, or about 1.7% of the market.
Gartner's estimate for Google might be a bit low -- other sources claim over 1M G1 preorders -- but the conclusion is clear: Apple still claims only a fraction of the smartphone market, and Android claims a fraction of that. So it's natural that an article like this one would focus on the question of "why aren't you developing for Symbian (47% marketshare), RIM (19.5%), or Windows Mobile (12.4%)?" rather than "why aren't you developing for Android?" (which has a 2 to 4% marketshare, 20 to 40% of Apple's market.) Symbian, RIM, and Windows Mobile are the elephants in this room.
Yes, Nokia, MS and RIM I can be sure, are trying and will continue to try to challenge the iPhone. I personally work for a large company that standardized on windows mobile for the sales team. I am also sure that in time Android will be a strong competitor.
I also know many people who picked a Nokia Eseries because it's cheaper. I know for sure that my next phone won't be an iPhone. So in many way I am almost sure that Nokia is well positioned to compete with the iPhone. And that the iPhone dominance wont last for long
Windows mobile is a joke. Hardly anyone installs apps with it or uses it for anything other than a phone/calendar/contacts. Android could be strong though.
The gaming market is soldiering proudly!!!
Or just simply - if you cannot watch ordinary porn clips on certain mobile device (small screen, slow cpu) this device worthless for developer. =)
iPhone simply outnumbered Nokia N-series and E-series handsets which are worth of development.