DISQUS

mikerowehl · 8 months ago

Awesome photo choice!

Thanks for following up on the initial post and summarizing the conversation. Kudos!

BNAMack · 8 months ago

Wow. A story that follows up with answers from the industry it targeted. Well done!

But I still found the answers disheartening. As someone who's responsible for a rather large group of customers/friends/family and acts as the tech info clearinghouse for everything from troubleshooting to purchasing I cannot help but notice that we are still being left with fewer and fewer choices. I will not try to argue the points made by developers as they are certainly valid. Just as they were when Microsoft was becoming the dominant player in the PC arena. I'm an advocate for choice and any rationalization, no matter how valid, for limiting choice is a blow to consumers.

At the risk of quoting BSG and Peter Pan - this has all happened before and it will all happen again. Meh.

Compare Child Trust Funds · 1 month ago

Totally agree with you BNAMack! iPhone may well become the new Microsoft of phones!

Steve · 8 months ago

Problem is with 1-3 person shops making the majority of iPhone apps, and a big huge market there... it's almost impossible for them to spend any time on anything else... unless someone makes a toolkit that ports already existing iPhone app code relatively easily to another platform... I don't think we'll ever see this kind of ecosystem with anything but Apple. My $.02. I get a tons of requests to port my app to RIM or WinMobile, but I just don't have the time :)

anonymous coward · 8 months ago

@steve Re: request to port to RIM or WinMo: Time aside, mobile porting is just a nightmare - which I hated so much.

Do they expect your app to work in Windows Mobile 6.5? What about 6.0? You are aware there are two versions of windows mobile right? - one support stylus and one don't.

What about screen resolution on the RIM? Some are much more high res than the others....The combination of complexity is endless....

mj93284 · 8 months ago

I think the only serious competition to iPhone at this point is Android. And Android is serious competition indeed: it's easy to develop for, has a great app store, and is far more open than iPhone. What limits Android is the G1. Let's hope there will soon be more Android phones available for more carriers.

Nokia is out of the game because their platform is awful. Windows Mobile .NET is an OK development environment, but the platform itself, the APIs, and its ties to Windows make it a disaster in its own right.

Fact Checker · 8 months ago

Why the hell do you keep calling the poor guy "Ewan MacLeod" - that is not his name!

Matt Marshall · 8 months ago

Can you be specific? that's what he's going by.

Gibson Tang · 8 months ago

What makes the Apple App Store so great is the low cost of entry(I just need to pay $99 and get a Mac), lack of device fragmentation, but the high level of secrecy can be pretty irritating since sometimes your email goes unanswered for weeks on end. Nokia Ovi still has a long way to go especially if they are proceeding with the Java Verified path.

Android seems to be the closest competitor as it has almost all the good points that Apple adopted with it's App Store, except that Android being open source will increase the chance of device fragmentation as theoretically, Motorola etc etc can just compile their own version of Android with proprietary features and developers will have to deal with multiple code bases again.

Anyway, my blog has a small table listing the good and bad points of Apple's App Store compared to the other competitors
http://www.gibsontang.com/?p=187

valto · 8 months ago

I want to share this great presentation about "How to choose a mobile development platform?" By Teemu Kurppa http://ow.ly/2IGl I think it's got some great point to this discussion.

Mark · 8 months ago

Your article would have a point if it wasn't for one thing: All the iPhone's current major applications were written for S60 years ago so there's little scope for development unless they leverage touchscreen technology - which they're now doing.

No-one cares what a few independent developres think: Nokia's tie ups are with the big players and are mainly centred around games.

matthaus · 8 months ago

You probably neither attended GamesBeat nor did you follow our coverage. The gaming industry disagrees with you.

Peter Antypas · 8 months ago

Sorry to spoil it for you but the M.O. of the app business is "bottom-up", not "top-down". Screw the "big players". They're becoming dinosaurs.

Ryan · 8 months ago

And thank god for that!

swag · 8 months ago

Phone apps are dinosaurs from the 1990s -- a momentary patch to cover for abysmal Web support by today's phones.

Zsolt Váradi · 8 months ago

Right. And modern operating systems are just dinosaurs from the '60s to cover until the cloud takes over. What are you smoking?

Michael · 8 months ago

Wow,

firstly apps should not be developped for devices but for platforms, saying Nokia or Ovi sucks, show a lack of understanding of the mobile value chain.

Premium SMS (ups lost all the Americans there) showed the way.... That was 1999....
that the Yanks cant work it out, and belive that the rest of the world works like the US should be a big wakeup call.

Varley · 8 months ago

Saying apps should be developed for platforms rather than devices shows a complete lack of understanding of the basic realities of mobile software development. Even J2ME apps, the poster boy for portability, have to be tested and modified for every device you want to run them on.

Varley · 8 months ago

Lee M. Williams' comments are exactly the kind of vacuous BS that alienates developers. Symbian is a platform with broken frameworks, broken development tools, and a myriad of broken devices to run on. No sane developer will write code for Symbian unless they're paid significantly more than writing for another platform. It's is a dead platform. If I were a betting man I'd wage on Nokia making a move to push Maemo based platform into their smart phones in the next few years.

Zsolt Váradi · 8 months ago

Agreed. But hey, there are already rumors in and out of Nokia (eg.: http://www.unwiredview.com/2009/04/09/nokia-mid... ) about using Maemo on phones. It's like an execution warrant on Symbian.

tryrleool · 7 months ago

One thing that the iPhone is missing is "easy" programing like android has. I'm web programmer, so I know Flash, Java, some Python, ect, ect. The fact that in order to make a app that has about the complexity of most web apps requires the knowlage of a "hardcore" and archaic langauge Objective C is a little disheartening.

I'm sure the entire "programming" community will flame me for this, and I totally understand. But when i see a iPhone app that i could build in Flash AS 3.0 or Java with half as much code, I'm stuck watching (for now) because i don't have a firm understanding of pointers and header files. You see Japanese cellphones apps that run in flash all the time, and they are functional and look great. Imagine if they finally implement flash app support on the iphone? Then it really will be the only platform programmers will want to go for, and it would have a huge profit margin for apple (i surely would be ready to pay the 99). The only problem you run into at this point is of course over saturation.

orion · 6 months ago

tryrleool, 12 years old boy has few apps on the app store!
If you consider yourself programmer and have problems learning Objective C, that you should rethink whether you should consider coding or just do graphic design.

edsion007 · 2 months ago

Hmmm... why it has to do with twitter so much?

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