I received a note from Andy Gilbertson, one of the developers behind Parallel Kingdom, a location-based mobile massively multiplayer (or MMO) game that uses your GPS location to place you in a virtual world atop the real world. The game seems like an obvious winner for the iPhone, but the team has been struggling to get it past Apple's app review policies.
Gilbertson's travails with the iPhone application acceptance process illustrates why Apple's gating of applications is a troubling reality for developers--and for consumers. And while it's understandable to have a gating mechanism in place, if Apple wants to remain at the top of the mobile application space, it so heavily dominates, the company needs to commit more resources to not just the application review process, but in communicating with developers. As of my last e-mail exchange with Gilbertson, Apple had not responded for more than six days. My call to App Store PR has gone unreturned for about 18 hours as of this post.
Apple's acceptance policies can be shockingly difficult to navigate, so much so that some have marveled at the fact that an ecosystem could build up at all.The fact that iPhone applications are written in Objective C, a previously uncommon programming language, is in and of itself a show-stopper for many developers, but that obviously hasn't stopped development.
Earlier today Ars Technica wrote about several prominent developer including Facebook's Joe Hewitt, Second Gear's Justin Williams, and longtime Mac software developer Rogue Amoeba, all of whom recently "decided that enough is enough" and that they would abandon iPhone development efforts. And while each cites different reasons, the underlying thread is that they've had enough of waiting for Apple to distribute their apps, an instantaneous effort on the Internet.
While restrictive or complex policies are unlikely to stop the iPhone juggernaut, they can be very painful reminders of what would happen if we regress 15 years to the unfortunate walled gardens of AOL. Tim O'Reilly reminded us of the risk of the closed Web recently, commenting that "anyone can put up a Web site, or launch a new Windows or Mac OS X or Linux application, without anyone's permission. But put an app onto the iPhone? That requires Apple's blessing."
It's unlikely that a few developers falling off of the iPhone train will have a dramatic effect on the growth of the market, but this kind of unhappiness can easily lead to a backlash. The big question is if another mobile platform can take the place of the iPhone.
Android has arguably the best chance, but it currently struggles due to immaturity of its own application ecosystem. Nonetheless, there is a huge revenue opportunity for an open-Web approach to mobile applications. It remains to be seen if Android can live up to the hype and not fall into the same trappings as the App Store. For all of Apple's sins in how they run that business, it's undeniable that it remains hugely successful.
My previous post about mobile data sync brought in several public comments and many more private e-mails from various companies asking for perspective on how the leading mobile platforms will compete in the sync space and whether or not start-ups like Funambol can compete.
More than anything else, the leading mobile devices--the iPhone and BlackBerry, are marketed more effectively than any other platform, especially Windows Mobile, which by all counts should be the leader.
It's not that Windows Mobile is so terrible (you can decide for yourself), but that Microsoft hasn't done enough to make users want to use it.
In a conversation today, I learned a bit about Microsoft's My Phone service, which I had previously never heard of, and also a bit about Palm's strategy in relation to making the Pixi a device of choice for the younger set. Minutes later, the two worlds collided when I hit the My Phone site and came across this image of bitter irony.
It's an ad for a Palm product that doesn't run Windows Mobile, or work with the Microsoft service, running on the MSN ad network, prominently displayed on the My Phone page. It confused me so much that I actually clicked on the ad to see if the services were somehow related.
There definitely is some logic from the Palm side--i.e. getting users to their devices, but this is an interesting failure of contextual advertising for Microsoft, allowing a direct competitor dominate the banner ad on their service page. Really, neither side benefits from the ad placement and considering the woeful state of both businesses, one would hope they care enough to not embarrass themselves and at least keep competitor ads off of their own sites.
While neither Windows Mobile nor Palm will be totally dead any time soon, if I'm on Apple's iPhone team, or working on Android, I wouldn't be too worried.
As consumers increasingly purchase sophisticated smartphones such as the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Droid, they are developing expectations for how these phones allow contacts, calendars, e-mail, and social networks to remain in sync across all their devices.
One of the big challenges is that users don't always maintain the same source of inputting data--they switch from browser to desktop application to smartphone as their data access and entry point, introducing many variables into the data chain. And data integrity will only get more complicated as more applications become browser-based and keep no local data storage.
Most enterprise users have a local store in addition to the cloud storage, something that I still find puzzling from the T-mobile Sidekick outage, where consumer data that should have been in multiple locations (or at least present on the device) was thought to be lost.
The most common sync services are not provided directly by the mobile operator. Generally this is a good thing, as the more you can dis-intermediate the carrier, the more control you have over your data. But because the sync services are provided by others--notably Microsoft, Google, and Apple--you end up locked-in to their data structures as well as whatever privacy and data management issues that might arise in relation to advertising or other usage of your information.
Today, you can fairly easily sync your mobile device with most common online e-mail and PIM services although the BlackBerry, Droid, and the iPhone differ in their approaches--or at least in the visibility of how they work. For example, you can sync with Gmail and other services on the iPhone, but it rather perversely requires the Microsoft ActiveSync protocol.
By controlling the address book, Google and Apple effectively lock-in users to their sync service, leaving the carriers and devices to be easily replaced (minus the cancellation charges.) The user would barely notice the difference, aside from the sticker on his phone that says AT&T or Verizon.
Mobile operators do not want to cede control of the address book to Google or Apple, but they are late to the game and do not yet have sync solutions of their own. As a result, they are scrambling to add this functionality, but building a sync solution that works with all different devices and email services is no easy task, thanks to the widespread problem of device fragmentation in the industry.
One option is to deploy a white label solution, like the open mobile cloud sync offered by Funambol. Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco told me the company has been approached by many of the top mobile operators, with several of them looking to setup sync services for their customers. They all recognize the issue, and according to Capobianco can turn to Funambol as a way to quickly bring a high-quality solution to market.
With all the different players in mobile sync, users will begin to question who owns their data. Enterprise users, in particular, should have privacy concerns about trusting their data to someone else. In the case of Android users, there is a growing anti-Google sentiment, and if Google already owns your email, calendar, and search queries, do you really want them to own your phone contacts as well?
Amazon Payments today launched a new service that brings the company's payment processing tools to mobile devices. Amazon Mobile Payments Service (MPS) includes a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) that allow mobile developers and merchants to provide payment options to their customers within mobile Web sites and applications--including the convenience of Amazon's 1-Click checkout system.
There are already a number of mobile payment providers, but Amazon is the big dog of the e-commerce world with an enormous amount of customer accounts already in use. This could be an excellent option for companies that offer mass-market mobile applications and are looking for ways to easily accept payments.
The service will automatically detect the request origin, meaning a Web or mobile browser, or a mobile application so that developers don't need to re-work their applications.
... Read moreMicrosoft's launch party videos have proven to be entertaining to viewers even if not for the reasons for the marketing department had hoped for. There were a great many comments on my post that provided context to their release, but generally speaking most industry-watchers have been confused as to the goals behind the program, questioning the target audience not just for the videos, but for the launch parties as well.
I reached out to Microsoft for comment but they withheld at this time as the videos are apparently just one step in a much larger integrated marketing campaign.
I personally found the most recent video weird, but after thinking through things a bit I think this is a case of a good idea hampered by poor execution. The videos are well-done and professional and try to connect with consumers in a humanistic tone. The fact that it feels like you stumbled into a shiny-happy Windows world filled with sit-com throwaways is the problem. Even if this is a training video to show others how to throw a launch party, it's hard to connect with the vapid characterizations of party guests.
This is the crux of Microsoft's marketing problems. It's not that they aren't good at technical marketing issues, it's that the brand itself is so voluminous, it's very hard for people to connect to specific products like Windows. And the efforts to persuade consumers isolate the tech media and confuse IT shops.
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It's no secret that Japan has better mobile phones than the rest of the world. The country has also had access to better phone-based Internet services since the launch of NTT DoCoMo's i-mode service all the way back in 1998.
Recent data from japan.internet.com (translated by whatjapanthinks.com) suggests that Japan's mobile phones offer users enough functionality that 49 percent of the respondents to a recent survey say a "mobile phone is enough" when asked what kind of mobile device they would most like to carry.
- Mobile phone is enough 49.2 percent
- Smartphone 22 percent
- Netbook 16.3 percent
- Notebook computer 8.9 percent
- MID/UMPC 0.3 percent
- Other 0.3 percent
- Don't want to carry anything 3 percent
In addition to the wealth of services and games, with the character-based typing you really don't need an iPhone or other smartphone unless you need to access corporate e-mail. While this can also be delivered directly to mobile phones, in my experience most companies don't allow access unless it's through a VPN.
... Read moreA recent study released by ABI Research says that limited processing power, battery life, and data storage will limit mobile application growth in the mass market, even among smartphones like Apple's iPhone.
But, applications that connect to cloud resources are much more likely to be successful than those that run only on the mobile device.
ABI Research predicts mobile cloud computing will deliver annual revenues topping $20 billion over the next five years. ABI Research senior analyst Mark Beccue says device fragmentation and memory currently limit the level of sophistication developers can deliver through mobile apps. By contrast, running mobile applications in the cloud will free up mobile processors while also enabling developers to create just one version of their application.
"Cloud computing will bring unprecedented sophistication to mobile applications," noted Beccue. "To mention just a few examples, business users will benefit from collaboration and data sharing apps. Personal users will gain from remote access apps allowing them to monitor home security systems, PCs or DVRs, and from social networking mashups that let them share photos and video or incorporate their phone address books and calendars."
Funambol, an open-source mobile cloud sync company, seems to agree with this view of the future. When I spoke to Fabrizio Capobiano, CEO at Funambol, he said: "Mobile cloud sync is emerging as a major new category of wireless services. Apple, Google, Nokia, Microsoft, Palm, and others recently introduced mobile cloud sync services and all mobile operators and ISPs are racing to keep up. Current solutions are fairly basic, but open source is enabling more flexibility and innovation among these folks because it is so easy to adapt."
You can hear more about open source and mobile cloud sync from Mike Taczak, a team lead for Webmail apps at Rackspace, as he describes how the company uses Funambol in the video below.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.
Apparently you can make a lot of money with an iPhone application. According to TechCrunch, Social Gaming Network's (SGN) Fleet Air Superiority Training F.A.S.T. dogfight game "pulled in over $1 million in download fees alone in the first six weeks it was available."
F.A.S.T was originally priced at $9.99 but SGN has varied the pricing as part of their launch plan. It currently sells for $1.99 and is said to be bringing in as much as $60,000 per day.
As I wrote earlier in the week about Flash games, quality matters. SGN's initial games were OK if not great, but F.A.S.T and Vampire vs. Werewolves are significantly more complex and entertaining.
It's not clear that F.A.S.T can maintain this trajectory or how much of a lifetime any iPhone application has. But, there is something to be said for the strategy of building an engine that allows for more games to be built and for licensing the technology to others.
Still, with more than $100 million invested in iPhone start-ups, there are going to have to be a lot more companies developing high-quality games and a lot more iPhone users (which means multiple carriers) to prove the market anywhere near $1 billion and prove to be a good return on venture capital.
This also brings up some interesting questions about how microtransactions and virtual goods play into premium games (i.e. those that you pay more than $1.99 for) versus free to play social games. There's not enough in the competitive market yet to see a trend, but I suspect we'll see a further movement toward cheap barrier to entry and a heavier reliance on alternative means of revenue generation.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.
From a software and cloud perspective, the iPhone represents an ideal world of development functionality mixed with an ability to use mobile services. However, the App Store approval process and AT&T's wonky network will still prevent us from reaching nirvana.
I tried to chronicle the issues I've had, but the truth is, the service (and therefore the device itself) ranges from excellent to sporadic to unusable, so I'll just list out the broad issues for those considering a move to the 3GS.
Battery life--the battery life is abysmal. I've gone on every forum, tweaked every setting, and done several tests to see what works best. The hacks that people suggest (turn off push, 3G, and Bluetooth) defeat the purpose of the device. Users shouldn't have to handicap themselves because of a lack of attention from the manufacturer.
If Apple really wants enterprise and business users, this is the most important issue that must be resolved.
Phone --I haven't been a fan of AT&T mobile service in the past (Verizon Wireless is my carrier of choice) and it continues to range from terrible to mediocre for me. Bizarrely, the worst call quality occurs when talking to another AT&T user. I did a conference call the other day with two other iPhone users and none of use could decipher the others' words.
I gave up on the 3G network both for the battery drain and the calls that dropped after 10 minutes (I took notes for 2 days) and every call dropped. A recent survey says that 34 percent of those polled won't buy the iPhone because of AT&T's network.
... Read moreMobile services continue to mature, and the things you can do on a phone keep getting better even when we are forced to suffer with inconsistent and occasionally terrible quality from mobile carriers.
The vast majority of new services we see in the U.S. have some basis in the DoCoMo i-Mode service from NTT Japan. If you're looking for mobile opportunities, take a gander at Japan and Korea to see how mobile devices shape lives and society.
I spoke with Gerhard Fasol, head of Eurotechnology Japan about a recent report discussing Nintendo and Japan's gaming industry are effected by new devices like the iPhone and services like the App Store, as well as how Japanese electronics manufacturers are trying to make their console/device the center of user's lives.
Since DoCoMo's i-Mode started mobile phone games in 1999, "online and mobile phone games combined have outgrown the video game software sector and are certain to grow much more in coming years. The iPhone, for example, is not slowing mobile phone based gaming down...those who only count video game cassettes and consoles, certainly don't see the rapid mobile and online growth--and complain about shrinking markets."
But really what vendors are feeling is their shrinking control--game vendors and carriers have pushed their own walled gardens, which works fine as long as they can provide what people want--and sooner or later then can't. Think AOL versus the Internet if you need more explanation.
According to Fasol, games of all kinds used to be played in game parlors, and some of Japan's game giants were originally (and still are) game parlor machine makers (a round of Dance-Dance-Revolution anyone?)
These game vendors then moved on to consoles, cassettes and handhelds, taking the momentum out of game parlors, and establishing a pattern of growth by generations (today we are in the 7th generation).
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