The key take away from this article is not to build your app in J2ME but to recognize how big the world is outside of America. American focused startups face lots of competition in a relatively small market.
With J2ME phones rapidly declining as they are being replaced by smartphones (even $50 Android smartphones going into this year), and the vast majority of those smartphones being Android (even Microsoft is considering replacing Nokia Asha's OS with Android, therefore killing another a huge chunk of the J2ME market), Android's platform is basically the "new J2ME". So to follow the author's own advice, you should build an Android app.
The choice of platform should be made based on the value proposition. In the case of whatsapp, the business is based on undercutting the price-gouging of SMS with a superior alternative for $1 per year. This makes it affordable and appealing to everyone, including (especially) J2ME and Android users in the developing word.
If your app fits this profile, definitely go Android first.
But.. if your app is more appealing to people with discretionary income, you are shooting yourself in the foot if you don't start with iOS because that's where the users with money are.
The hard part is getting partners or marketers everywhere, making sure they understand what you're trying to accomplish, making sure they don't rip you off and start their own clone with all your users and somehow providing support for all those people speaking different languages.
And of course, then there's the payments - receiving/sending payments is very hard, every country has their own preferred method that does not integrate with others at all.
Rough numbers: USA is a $16T economy, most of which is on the internet. China is an $8T economy, most of which is not. India is $1.8T.
There is certainly opportunity here, particularly in the long term (probably why Facebook bought them), which is why I'm in India introducing people to BayesianWitch. But be realistic about the market.
Usually people equate the French speaking world with France,Switzerland and Belgium.
Which is surprising since Canada has almost 7 million French speakers.
that's a bit depressing, given the importance of colonialism in those areas.
In contrast, the wireless subscriber base was 875 million in 2013 (2).
Source: 1. “Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia's Next Superpower” by McKinsey; Published 2013 2. TRAI: Highlights on Telecom Subscription Data as on 31st October, 2013
To give you an example: there is no reddit equivalent in French. The closest things we have are a few French-speaking subreddits that have very few subscribers since reddit scares people who don't speak English before they can reach the French-speaking subreddits. We also have a few very poor quality reddit rip-offs with no users.
Granted, the French-speaking world is not as big as the US market. But 100 million people is already a decent target, don't you think?
Was there a particular social forum that ruled minitel - did it transition to the web?
Probably a strip of language names along the top, taking you to language-filtered frpnt-pages would help. It would be ugly, but it's Reddit.
That said, http://fr.reddit.com/ should be the top posts from the French-language subreddits, not just the main frontpage with a French UI.
It's still gread that they provided a multilingual UI, but as a whole, us companies could always use to understand the foreign market a little bit better than just providing a UI translation...
The French consumer market has tons of holes like this. And we're talking about a huge, wealthy market with plenty of mobile devices and solid broadband. It's not a wide-open market, but there are tons of opportunities.
I'm hearing more and more about French startup accelerators, and I'm seeing a lot more seed-stage startups. So people are making an effort to serve this market. But there's still a lot of opportunities.
We got a ton of feedback from French speakers that they preferred the English content, so we ended up settling on selecting a UI based on the A-L header but giving the default English content (unless you specifically set it otherwise).
In any case I think that if you really wanted to target the French-speaking population, it would be best to have a separate site or at least a clearly separated part of the site.
There's one for every supported language.
It would be a different story if the content available was comparable, but it usually isn't.
Caching 2 pages in RAM also means instant undo when I open the story link.
[1] http://dx.com/s/android%2bphone?PriceSort=up&category=511
Of course it is likely to have other issues, but don't limit yourself to saying what is possible... think about the cost to actually deploy that possibility.
The anecdotes from the 80s & 90s when annual PC sales for any given year were a substantial portion of the overall PCs in use at the time are interesting. The realization that software could be written for the newest machine and it would run everywhere soon enough is not directly applicable to the smartphone market. I think that out of collective habit, many apps assume that building for this year's flagship models is the best course. It may be, but it effectively means your market is much smaller, especially for free, network effect apps.
These apps and their ecosystems rise and fall fast. Tablets & smartphones are spreading downmarket with devices being sold today @ 10% of the first androids.
A $50 phone won't run everything, but it will run some things - useful things.
Ignoring the fictional statistics, the cheap devices (e.g. Xiaomi) in countries like China still tend to be surprisingly powerful, and you hardly need to design down to them. And it's a rare app, beyond something like video conferencing, that puts any real burden on connectivity.
I did, however, say that many of the cheap phones are quite powerful. And they are. And as someone who has several widely deployed games on Android -- one category where there is much more demands than categories like WhatsApp -- it is absolutely no problem at all.
I generally test things on the Nexus One just as a bottom end comparator. Compared to many of the devices from bottom-tier manufacturers now, the Nexus One is grossly underpowered. It is always surprising what it can run with gusto.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/11/12/idc-data-shows-66-...
And it turns out I misrepresented the fictional statistic. The "real" number is 66%. Though I suppose if you count older mid tier models (this counts sales) still in use, 80% might be pretty close.
IMO you still need to design dow a bit, especially for data poor users. Also smaller screens. In some cases I think craigslist is the thing to emulate.
While I don't normally agree with dismissing something from the source -- in this case Apple Insider -- the way that the article digs to try to generate their manufactured numbers borders on comical. Secondly, the metric that it is "junk" (the article's word) because the ASP is $200+ is asinine, if you will. As is the notion that such makes it a "feature phone" (where ASPs were in the LOW double digits).
A $200 device in many Asian markets is a decidedly premium device. The Xiaomi Redmi, for instance, is a $139 (retail!) decidedly decent mid-range device. In no way does anyone have to design down at all for devices like that, the notion being absurd.
Androids are penetrating markets that were never penetrated by PCs or the web or even residential electricity.
The really fun thing about WhatsApp is that it is essentially a product for the developing world, and to make money doing that you have to be seriously efficient.
So be very, very careful about trying to 'serve' that demographic.