WIP Jam Sessions - Connecting Developers

We’ve asked our speakers and sponsors to provide some blog fodder as a lead up to Mobile Jam on September 12.   Sean O’Sullivan from Dial 2 Do weighs in, with a little help from Raj Singh:

 I’m helping run a couple of session sat the Mobile Jam Session at CTIA Wireless San Francisco next week, so I said I’d write a few words as input for the session. 

From a mobile developer’s perspective, the last few years have been wonderfully frustrating. It’s a classic case of “on the one hand….but on the other hand”. I think we should use the session to flesh out both sides of today’s current position for a mobile developer, and then present a summary at the end of the day. And we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously. So without further ado, here’s a straw set of input on what’s better, what’s worse, for mobile developers, today…

Life is better as a mobile developer today because

• The toolset these days is composed of more than just vi
• There’s evidence that some people do actually buy mobile apps these days
• The handset guys are finally starting to let us at the cool stuff (address book, GPS, SMS…)
• The carrier will now let me keep more than 2 cents on the dollar In fact, Mobile advertising finally allowed the independent developer to make money although only pennies compared to going premium on-deck  (for most apps)
• I don’t have to mortgage my house anymore to have an application certified for a network
• The PalmOS has died a death so I can just forget about developing for it. Phew!
• Things are not bad If you focus on the mid-development-tier :  i.e. not native apps - but create great web applications and just bet on better browsers across all phones
• Carriers now treat me like their friend
• I can use images larger than a postage stamp
• Analytics for everything has improved - so we don’t have to go to court to figure out my app was downloaded a million times
• Social networks have created a whole new pull for rich, connected mobile applications; connecting the online world with my mobile world is a truly rich new vein for cool apps
• Apple are dragging the whole ecosystem in to the 21st century

Life is worse as a mobile developer today because

• Turned out Java wasn’t the answer!
• They said life was going to get simpler; Android, iPhone, LiMo, WinMobile, J2ME - they lied! Apple has just added more fragmentation – the target platforms are going through a shift but there is still a ton of platforms – porting is as hard as it has ever been, if not worse (aside: as the platfroms become richer, with GPS, 3D graphics, this porting problem becomes worse not better)
• The carriers man, the carriers - don’t talk to me.  Apple’s App store has been executed well - but it has only shifted the walled-garden (i.e. Apple will not list local music playing apps or even a competing browser like Skyfire, ha!)
• The Widget ecosystem is a mess – too many proprietary runtimes although a chick of light appears with regard to standardisation on web runtimes for widgets finally starting to happen
• Browsers are different; APIS are different; busness models are different; permissions are different - gimme a break!
• “Allow this application to access the internet” - excuse me?
• Seamless convergence is not really in the interest of the carrier - so I have a hard sell for my “converged app”
• I’d need a Cray just to run all the toolsets I need 
• They still need a note from my parents before they’ll deploy my application (well, that’s how it feels)
• Thanks Mr Carrier, your API is waaaay cool. It’s just a leeeetle different to to every other carrier’s API….. but thanks anyway

More suggestions? Send them to sos “at” dial2do with the subject “Jamtastic”

Tweet This Post