Public; a digital creative agency

I had a very interesting day at Over The Air 09 in London a month ago – both the keynotes, sessions, and attendees were heavily geared towards turning web developers into mobile developers. Widgets got bounced around a lot. At the opening of the conference, an informal poll revealed that out of the 200 or so attendees present maybe only a dozen were ‘native’ (ie, Obj-C, .net, etc) software engineers. The keynote speakers genuinely all seemed to believe that native apps were on the way out, to be replaced by cross platform widgets.

To be honest, it all seemed terribly false. The Vodafone keynote was delivered by Rick Fant, ‘Head of Internet Discovery’ (which apparently means being in charge of the ‘development and deployment of consumer and developer services associated with internet enabled applications). I heard a lot about Vodafone’s vision of a ‘unified app store’, and their ‘Vodafone 360′ effort. It’s unfortunate then, that in less than a week after telling the conference attendees Vodafone was committed to a single, carrier based App Store they decided to start carrying the iPhone in the UK. Which won’t be part of their unified app service. And yet will probably be their biggest selling smartphone.

In fact, throughout the conference the iPhone was a big, hulking presence that nobody wanted to really talk about. “There are other devices out there”, was the mantra, “…the iPhone isn’t everything”. This is true – but shortsighted. It’s not about the hardware. It’s about the software. Consider this – the iPhone may only have a fraction of the overall cell phone market share, but the iPod dominates all competing portable media players. 40% of all iPhone OS devices are iPod based.

There’s a huge market for iPhone OS based software outside of the cellular arena…a market that mobile networks can’t penetrate. No other mobile OS can hope to achieve this – Android may be readily available for non-mobile devices, but no Android media player can hope to make significant inroads against the iPod’s Walkman-like position as the de-facto playback device. Furthermore, iPhone and iPod users are used to certain UI paradigms and conventions. Developers who attempt to code for multiple devices and platforms using ‘widgets’ won’t break into iPhone territory, because their apps simply won’t take advantage of what users expect and demand from their apps.

We can ignore the iPhone at conferences like OTA, and we can pretend that carrier-operated ‘global app stores’ and widgets are the future of mobile development…but in the end, Apple’s still left getting revenue from their devices, revenue from app sales, and in many cases a cut of customer’s monthly contract fees. The mobile market is at a similar point to the early PC market – many, fragmented, and competing platforms and devices. We can try to code for all of them, but it seems certain that at some point devices one platform is going to break forward and become the de-facto standard of choice.

Put it this way – the iPod was introduced in 2001. Many people thought it a useless device that would sell very little.  It took three, maybe four years until it really started to make a major impact with the Mini and new generation iPod models. We’re only two years into the iPhone OS platform, and already it rivals Blackberry in terms of users. Pushing widgets as the technology of the future for mobile development is surely unwise when we consider the future potential for the iPhone platform.

Posted by Nick // Posted in: Development //