Developers should target mobile devices

[Bob Russell]

According to Rob Shaddock, corporate vice president and chief technology officer of Motorola, there is a tremendous opportunity for developers by writing for mobile devices. I wouldn't expect anything else from one of the leading handset makers, but still it makes sense.

"Shaddock suggested that some 900m client units will be sold this year, which suggests that the rate of development of new services and features is giving a large percentage of those units a lifecycle of less than 12 months. Motorola itself expects to sell, this year, more mobile phones than the entire world PC industry put together."

Handsets are more frequently replaced than PCs, and they are soon going to enable a whole new set of application possibilities due to broadband connectivity.

On the other hand, I read recently that revenues from mobile software purchases are starting to sag. Ringtones, applications and other add-ons just aren't booming like they used to, despite the big sales figures for devices. And even the price point of mobile applications for handsets is weakening. Sorry, don't have the reference, but it was in the news recently if you really want to search out the details.

But it's natural to see both opportunity and erosion of profits in any new and evolving industry. It was not so long ago when commentators first expressed their shock and how it was going to become hard to even stay in business as a PC seller. Some completely lost their heads and even predicted that in the future no one could make any money selling PCs. We're close, but the market always ensures that someone can make a few dollars, and it always will.

From TheRegister

[bwinton]

Originally Posted by Bob Russell

According to Rob Shaddock, corporate vice president and chief technology officer of Motorola, there is a tremendous opportunity for developers by writing for mobile devices.

I write software for mobile devices as part of my day job, and I've got to say that this is quite the ironic comment coming from the CTO of Motorola. Motorola causes us an order of magnitude more problems than any other phone manufacturer. Their MIDP implementations are both buggy and non-compliant; their networking layer is almost unusable; and useful specs on the devices are ludicrously hard to find. (As a developer, I care about the canvas size in pixels, not the screen size in inches!)

If he really wants people to develop stuff for his devices, then he should start by making them not suck, and follow up by making it easy to get the information developers need.

(Sorry if this is coming across as a rant, but Motorola has been the cause of a lot of pain for me recently..)

[Antoine of MMM]

I feel your pain, and look at it from another end. As a website developer, I deal with clients who have no idea what it means to build and use accessible anything until someone important wants it. I personally wish that more developers took accessiblty and mobile devices more seriously, but until someone like MSN/Yahoo/Google makes enough fuss about it where everyone is doing it, they will keep their heads in the sand..

[Dick Tracy]

I see two problems in Shadduck's logic:

1) short product lifecycle complicates development when "integrating new services and features" effectively changes the phone and can require extensive rewrite of applications, and

2) consumers do not want to keep re-purchasing applications each time they upgrade phones and balk at upgrade fees for the rewritten compatible app (which keeps food on the developers' tables).

No wonder the revenues are sagging.

[cervezas]

Originally Posted by bwinton

I write software for mobile devices as part of my day job, and I've got to say that this is quite the ironic comment coming from the CTO of Motorola. Motorola causes us an order of magnitude more problems than any other phone manufacturer. Their MIDP implementations are both buggy and non-compliant; their networking layer is almost unusable; and useful specs on the devices are ludicrously hard to find. (As a developer, I care about the canvas size in pixels, not the screen size in inches!)

I agree that it's ironic hearing these words from Motorola. But I'm pretty hopeful these days that the words actually signal a changing mindset on Moto's part. A lot of what they have done recently (opening the source to their Linux phone platform, opening the source to a MIDP testing harness, creating a public repository for their upcoming MIDP 3.0 implementation source code, and driving various JSRs that are designed to tighten up specs for Java-enabled devices) point to a new attitude toward openness and standardization by Motorola. This is certainly an attempt to reach out to developers where they've pushed them away in the past.

Recall that Moto attempted to acquire PalmSource in the Fall. They were clearly looking for a platform with an active developer community. When the acquisition failed I think the faction within Moto that has pushed for Java as its phone platform won out and we saw the wheels set in motion for a renewed push toward making Java ME a developer-friendly mobile computing platform. By "mobile computing" platform I mean something that exposes more of the power of the underlying system and makes Java competitive to native runtime environments like Symbian, Windows Mobile, and ALP. Take a look at the specs for MIDP 3.0 and you'll see what I mean.