Wireless

One App Store to rule them all?

(Credit: Apple)

Apple has an app store, of course. So does Microsoft. Google has two, one for Android and now one for Wave. In fact, it's hard to find anyone who doesn't have an app store these days.

We're swimming in app stores. Or drowning.

I'm serious. At the Symbian conference in London on Tuesday, I attended a panel that was overrun with app stores. Nokia, Symbian, GetJar, Sony Ericsson, Handmark, and Handango were all promoting their respective app stores, each talking about how great theirs is.

They're probably right. They probably are all great. But how am I, as a lay consumer, going to figure out which one to use?

More particularly, how will developers decide which platforms to target?

After all, everyone wants to be a platform these days. Does that mean that no one is?

Developers may be spoiled for choice, but "choice" in this case may not be what they want. Developers need to feed their families and will follow the money. Money is more easily made when choice is manageable (which is a euphemism for "limited").

This means we'll see plenty of application developers remain with Apple (though it's debatable whether the iPhone is the land of milk and honey for anyone but Apple), but we'll also continue to see a stampede to Google Android.

At present, every other mobile platform is playing for third place, but this could change: Symbian, as a foundation, is in a good position to launch an effective challenge to both Apple and Google if it can get its marketing and execution right.

Outside of mobile, it's unclear what role app stores will play. It's nice that Google Wave is getting an app store, but it's just one more "forge" among many. Every vendor (my employer, included) seems to feel an irresistible urge to create a forge/app store where third-party developers can "add value" to their "platforms."

Do we really need these? Or do we need more general repositories like Google Code and SourceForge?

I wish I had a definitive answer. I'm just not sure that these competing app stores do anything more than appeal to vendor vanity, and they could end up causing customer confusion.

As a consumer, I don't want to have to think about sorting among competing app stores. I just want applications.

Presumably, if I use a Sony Ericsson phone, I'll automatically find myself within its app store (unless my wireless provider doesn't slot me into its app store first, that is). But if that's the case, what's the point of making a big deal over a glorified catalog of applications that work with my given device/software/etc.?

It strikes me that app stores, like the cloud, are simply a way to dress up old ideas. If they help to organize potential buyers and sellers of software, great. But I still think I'd prefer meta-repositories of applications, similar to SourceForge, than individual application repositories for every single device or piece of software that I happen to buy.

How about you?

Apple's iPhone and Android-based smartphones have both seen solid growth throughout the world this year, says a report released Wednesday by AdMob.

The iPhone's worldwide market share jumped from 33 percent to 40 percent over February to August, according to AdMob's "August Mobile Metrics Report," which tracked smartphone usage for that six-month period. AdMob, which serves ads for mobile Web sites and apps, bases its numbers on data from ad requests, impressions, and clicks.

Phones running Google's Android OS picked up a 7 percent market share by August versus only 2 percent in February, thanks to rapid gains in North America and Western Europe, said AdMob. Since its debut this summer, T-Mobile's Android-powered MyTouch has been a top seller in both of those regions.

(Credit: AdMob)

With the launch of the Pre, Palm's WebOS has also taken off, grabbing a 4 percent slice of the smartphone market in August.

Top smartphones across the world

(Credit: AdMob)

On the downside, older smartphone systems have witnessed a drop in market share, according to AdMob.

The global share for Nokia's Symbian OS fell from 43 percent in February to 34 percent in August. However, Nokia smartphones remain hot sellers, accounting for 12 of the top 20 smartphones tracked by AdMob. Nokia's N97 and 5800 XpressMusic units were the fourth and fifth most popular smartphones in the U.K. for August.

Research In Motion's slice of the market dropped slightly from 10 percent in February to 8 percent in August. Still, RIM's Blackberry devices accounted for three of the top 20 smartphones around the world. The Palm OS, running on older units such as the Centro, declined in share from 3 percent in February to 1 percent in August.

Finally, Microsoft's Windows Mobile also lost share, falling from 7 percent in February to 4 percent in August, according to the report.

AdMob sells and tracks ads on mobile Web pages and applications to more than 7,000 publishers. The company compiled the data for this report based on its analysis of more than 10 billion monthly ad requests from over 160 different countries.

The Symbian Foundation and China Mobile have joined forces to promote the development of Symbian-based software for the Chinese operator's app store.

The partners will also promote the uptake of TD-SCDMA, the 3G standard developed in China as an alternative to WCDMA and other wireless interface technology. The collaboration agreement was announced Wednesday.

"The Symbian platform holds a strong position in China's mobile market, and we welcome the opportunity to build our relationship with the Symbian Foundation," Lu Xiang Dong, a vice president at China Mobile, said in a statement.

China Mobile, which is China's largest carrier with about 497 million subscribers, launched its Mobile Market app store in July. The alliance with the Symbian Foundation, the industry organization behind the Symbian open-source mobile operating system, aims to increase the number of Symbian developers contributing to the app store and broaden the range of software in it.

The first part of the program will involve the foundation streamlining its Symbian Signed accreditation process for mobile applications, Symbian Foundation founding director David Wood said.

"Symbian Signed will be simplified to make it easier for developers, by clarifying exactly what the tests will involve," Wood said. "Some of the tests were a bit subjective, in that (the same) apps could be submitted and pass or fail, which was frustrating for developers. We're moving away from style questions to address core functionality."

The Symbian Signed process will be added to China Mobile's submission process for Mobile Market, meaning that developers will be able to have their software tested, signed and approved in one go.

The signing process will also be more closely linked to Symbian's Horizon program, which assists developers in building applications for the mobile OS and helps them submit the software to app stores.

In addition, the foundation plans to launch a Chinese-language Symbian site, reflecting its user base. In August, 60 percent of developers submitting applications to be accredited by Symbian were Chinese, according to Wood.

Western operators are increasingly collaborating with Chinese companies. Telefonica, the international telecoms company behind O2 in the U.K., announced Monday a $1 billion share swap with China's No. 2 carrier, China Unicom.

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Nokia has released a test version of the software development kit for its Ovi application platform.

The kit's availability was announced Thursday at the Nokia World 09 event in Stuttgart, Germany, along with the release of a new application programming interface (API) for developers who want to integrate navigation capabilities into their applications.

The Ovi software development kit, or SDK, is a Web-based toolbox for developers that lets them create Web services and applications for handsets running either of Nokia's two smartphone operating systems: Symbian and Maemo.

Developers can write applications using standard Web technologies such as CSS, HTML, and Javascript, much as they can when writing for Palm's WebOS or the Bondi widget specification.

The new Ovi Navigation Player API is designed to be used alongside the existing Ovi Maps Player API, according to a Nokia blog post, and lets applications guide users to destinations.

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Sixty-seven percent of 2009's venture-backed mobile-application start-ups are developing their app to work on multiple platforms--namely, the top six mobile operating systems: iPhone, Palm, RIM, Android, Symbian, and Windows, according to new data from research firm Chubby Brain, 67.

Of the 33 percent that are developing platform-specific applications, development for the iPhone dominates all other platforms with slightly less than half of the investment dollars. This makes sense for a number of reasons, primarily the fact that the App Store is the easiest and clearest path to monetizing said applications.

Mobile OS

(Credit: Chubby Brain)

What's interesting about this data is that developers are actively supporting six different platforms for different reasons. For example, you need to support Symbian to reach a broad group of users, and you need to support Android to try to reach what could be the next big swath of mobile devices. But managing development efforts for all of those platforms will eventually become a major headache.

I suspect that we'll see a further shift to devices supporting Apple's iPhone, Research In Motion's BlackBerry, and Google's Android operating systems over time, as smartphone functionality becomes more important on a global scale.

Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.

In a move that will further increase Symbian's independence from Nokia, the Finnish phone manufacturer has agreed to sell its Symbian Professional Services unit to technology consultant firm Accenture.

The unit is responsible for customer engineering and customer support for Symbian OS, the world's largest operating system for smart phones. About 165 people will be transferred to Accenture as a result of the agreement, the terms of which were not disclosed.

The transaction, announced Friday, is expected to close by the end of the third quarter, according to a press release from Nokia.

Nokia acquired Symbian last year and transferred the operating system to the nonprofit Symbian Foundation. The organization on Thursday announced its take on application distribution--the Symbian Horizon application-publishing platform.

Symbian, the world's dominant but seriously challenged operating system for smart phones, on Thursday announced its take on application distribution--the Symbian Horizon application-publishing platform.

Symbian compares the program, which it has hinted at before, to a book publisher or record label. It's a one-stop-shop for developers to reach a series of phone application stores--those offered by phone carriers and manufacturers--and get revenue in return. Horizon, scheduled to launch in October, will also offer assistance with technical development issues and language translation.

Symbian, which has been nonprofit since Nokia acquired the British company last year and created the Symbian Foundation, will not charge anything for the program.

The only catch is that developers need to make really good apps--the Symbian Foundation will select which are good enough to be published.

"We're starting small and can only work with a limited number of apps initially," according to Symbian's Web page. However, in a blog post, the organization says the goal is to "develop a system that will automate this work allowing us to scale the program to include as many apps as possible."

This is an urgent issue for Symbian.

While Apple just announced 1.5 billion iPhone apps have been downloaded from its App Store and 65,000 apps are now available in the store, Symbian and its main proponent, Nokia, haven't seen anything close to that level of smartphone app awareness among its users.

Symbian's market share has fallen from an impressive 73 percent in 2006 to 50 percent in 2009, according to research firms, which still is a lot more than Apple's 10 percent or so, according to figures from market researcher Gartner.

But according to Symbian, its market share in North America, which is becoming the innovative center for smartphones, is a mere 5 percent.

Fighting competition from rivals is a tough mission. The difficulty for developers to make applications compliant with a wide variety of different Symbian handsets--at the moment about 70 models--and the lack of a well known app store, are obstacles for getting users' attention and attracting developers.

Symbian now says it is in discussions with seven stores for the Horizon program. It already has strategic relationships with Nokia's recently launched Ovi Store, Samsung Applications Store, and AT&T MEdia Mall.

It also said the process of signing Symbian applications, which developers have found cumbersome, will be simplified and in some cases eliminated.

Developers can submit an unlimited number of applications or even ideas, and will retain ownership over submitted applications.

Updated at 10:45 p.m. PDT to correct market share figures for the Symbian operating system.

The Symbian Foundation has released its first open-source software package, the first step in the organization's plan to eventually open-source the entire Symbian mobile operating system.

The Symbian Foundation was set up by in June 2008 by Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG, and AT&T to oversee the development of the Symbian OS as an open-source platform, licensed under the Eclipse Public Licence (EPL). The OS had previously been developed as proprietary software by the Symbian Foundation.

On Wednesday, Symbian made available its first package covered by the EPL, the OS Security Package, according to Symbian developer Craig Heath.

"The OS Security Package source code is now available under the EPL, and it is the very first package to be officially moved from the closed Symbian Foundation License (SFL) to...the EPL," Heath wrote in a blog post.

Heath said the EPL would allow the security package to bypass export regulations in the U.K., where the Symbian code is legally based.

"There is an exemption for software 'in the public domain,' meaning that open-source software isn't export-controlled, so moving it from SFL to EPL was the most straightforward way to make sure that the complete cryptographic functionality would be available to all," he wrote.

The move is also intended to demonstrate that Symbian is "serious" about both open source and security, according to Heath. The next step will be to open source the Symbian kernel, along with a basic set of components and drivers, according to Symbian chief architect Daniel Rubio.

"It has to be accompanied by all other components and drivers to run a shell with full I/O--for example, a Board Support Package, a hardware vehicle and, of course, a freely available toolchain," Rubio said in a blog post. "The good news is that we are working hard to make this happen in the short term, which in my mind is a three-month horizon."

Alongside the shift to open source, Symbian is working to integrate several components of the old software into a new operating system that will be released under the name Symbian ^2. The new OS is to be based on version 9 of the Symbian OS and will integrate the S60, UIQ, and MOAP user interfaces, according to Symbian. It is planned to begin beta testing in the next few weeks, and could appear in handsets in the first half of next year.

In March, Symbian said it plans to release a new version of the OS every six months, with Symbian ^3 planned for the middle of this year. Symbian competes with a number of mobile operating systems, including Apple's iPhone OS, Google's Android, and Microsoft's Windows Mobile.

Matthew Broersma of ZDNet UK reported from London.

The next version but one of Nokia's Maemo mobile Linux operating system will use Qt rather than GTK+ for its application development framework.

Basing Maemo Harmattan on Qt will make it easier for developers to write applications for both Maemo and Symbian, Nokia's smartphone platform, the Finnish company's development platform product manager Quim Gil said Saturday at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.

Harmattan will be the successor to the upcoming Fremantle, which is also known as Maemo 5. (Nokia code-names its Maemo versions after the names of winds.)

Gil said that Qt, acquired in Nokia's purchase of Trolltech a year ago, will not come "out of the box" in Fremantle, but it will have community support. This will open Maemo up to developers who work with the KDE desktop environment, which uses Qt, he said. Maemo is currently based largely on Gnome, a rival environment, which uses GTK+.

"For Harmattan, we will make a switch," Gil said. "It's not an easy switch. If you look at the platform, the Fremantle middleware will stay more or less the same, but now Qt will come as officially supported."

The Gnome community is being invited to work with the Maemo community to get Gnome applications working on this new, Qt-based version, he added.

There is a "good push inside Nokia to bring Maemo further to mainstream audiences", Gil noted. However, he conceded that Maemo-based devices such as the N810 tablet are aimed at a small, high-end market, which is an unattractive scenario for many developers.

"There is an interesting possibility of getting a common API based on Qt for Maemo and Symbian," Gil said. "If you're developing for a platform like Maemo, which doesn't bring you millions of users, with that work you can then do a Symbian port and then have a much wider reach on Symbian devices, using the common Qt API," Gil said.

Nokia will continue to contribute to the Gnome project and provide support for GTK+ libraries, he added.

Meanwhile, on Monday Nokia denied speculation it was working on an Android device, a development that would have meant the company was supporting three open-source platforms.

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.