Written by PatrickJ on Sunday, February 24, 2008

Want a Depressing Read? About The Death of Mobile Apps …


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The business of making native apps for mobile devices is dying, crushed by a fragmented market and restrictive business practices.

I always enjoy reading Michael Mace’s latest thoughts at Mobile Opportunity – but I have to admit that I found it very depressing reading today’s column, titled ‘Mobile applications, RIP’.  The column makes for sad reading all the way around if you’re a fan of (native) mobile applications, and of mobile software publishers.  It covers the best days of the mobile applications market – when the number of registered Palm developers jumped from 3,000 to over 130,000 in 22 months – and then focuses on how dire the current situation is for mobile apps publishers.

Mace shares the story of an old friend of his with years of big-time success in the mobile apps industry who has now given up the mobile applications business.  He also runs through how he and others are convinced that web application development will take the place of mobile apps. 

I like some web apps, and agree they should and will get better as we get access to faster and faster data networks, but I still find it immensely sad to think that true, native mobile apps are in such a sorry state.

Oh, and I think Mace has got it absolutely right in terms of placing a lot of the blame at the mobile operators’ feet:

If you’re an operator or a handset vendor, get used to life as a dumb pipe. By trying to control your customers and make sure you extract most of the revenue from mobile data, all you’ve done is drive developers to the Web, which is even harder to control. You could have had a middle ground in which you and mobile developers worked together to share the profits, but instead you’ve handed the game to the Google crowd.
Congratulations.

As always, the Mobile Opportunity article is well worth a read, at:

Mobile applications, RIP

What do you all think?  Anyone got a brighter, happier vision for the mobile applications marketplace?

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spmwinkel
Feb 25, 2008

News like this almost makes me feel guilty about winning so many applications here, and getting probably as many free through writing reviews and doing betatesting. Lots of people didn’t earn money from me!

(Of course on the other hand, betatesting and reviewing helps developers in other ways)

It’s sad indeed, certainly if I take into account something I just heard on television. While the Netherlands is doing pretty good when it comes to broadband internet, mobile connectivity is quite behind. Dutch people still think that mobile internet is too expensive. And until mobile internet is without data limit, like ADSL connections are, I don’t think the move to internet apps should go too quickly. As long as internet costs 6 euro’s for 25 MB and anything above that costs more in blocks of 25 kb, I want my apps to be installed on my device, and free to use (after getting a legal licence, of course).


Ragart
Feb 25, 2008

haha spmwinkel — I used to pay $5 CAD for 5 MB, and $10 for 10 MB. That was the best deal around. I think 25 MB might cost $100 CAD right now, hahaahha.


spmwinkel
Feb 25, 2008

That’s bad. :(
Perhaps the Dutch situation is just bad compared to the average European situation, or it’s just Dutch people complaining again. ;)
Luckily Orange in the Netherlands allows for some hack that remove the data limit while making some pages unavailable. But those pages can be visited if I disable the hack, which means that only those things are downloaded from my 25 MB.
Unfortunately, downloading e-mail with the messaging application has to go from those 25 MB so that’s not an option, I still have to check my e-mail by browsing to Gmail.com (which does work with the hacked connection settings).

Luckily not a lot of people know about the hack, and Orange doesn’t see this as a threat. So they don’t do a lot about it, pretty much as a gift for the online community that is involved enough to find out about it.

I hope that the operators make the data a bit (or a lot ;) ) cheaper in the future. I’ve heard that in Japan SMS messages cost like only 2 cents, while we used to pay 23 cents per message. A while ago prizes dropped to ~8 cents per message if you take a 60 (or 120, 240, etc) messages per month plan, but still apparently it still can be cheaper!


Menneisyys
Feb 25, 2008

I don’t quite agree with the original article, Windows Mobile-wise. I’m a Web technologies (Ajax etc.) guru myself so I know what I’m speaking about.

Currently, it’s pretty much impossible to provide a really working Web-based app, particularly given that IEM (on WM) is still NOT Ajax-compliant (unless it’s done in the IEM way).

Of course, if the author means J2ME (or, to a lesser extent, BREW), the situation is better.

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