As you an probably imagine it's very easy to be intimitated but also deeply impressed by the success of the Apple mobile App Store when you're working for a device manufacturer building their own application store. 100'000 apps and counting is truly an impressive achievement.
Still, one has to ask, what's next? Where is the mobile application ecosystem heading?
Once upon a time, not too long ago, the internet was no larger than a 100'000 web sites. Today, it's far above 200 million. How did the Internet grow like this? Can we learn anything from that when trying to look ahead in to the future of mobile applications?
Can we imagine a world where there are not 100'000 applications but many more. Why not for arguments sake make it a billion. It's a nice, round number, so why not?
Just as a thought exercise: what would it take to get us to one billion mobile applications? I think this is a very interesting questions that may shed some light on the future of mobile.
One thing is, application development has to be much simpler. Each and everyone with a mobile phone has to be able to create applications. Probably people wouldn't even think of it as programming, simply creating. (Read this for some interesting thoughts on the subject.)
Secondly, application discovery must be much improved. Of course with one billion apps, most of them are not relevant for you, so a powerful filter and search is needed. Probably you would need a context aware store front so that when I'm standing in the centre of Lund a Friday after noon, the One Billion Apps App Store (OBAAS) would adapt and present to me the most useful apps for the situation I'm in. I'm guessing there's huge opportunity here for advertisement models.
The flip side of application discovery is application publishing. Blogging was a revolution for website publishing. Micro-blogging like Twitter and Jaiku even more so. People don't even think of it as publishing, but it is. Remember 10 years ago, how difficult it was to set up a web site? Today, anyone can start publishing. It's as easy as taking a picture. Having a review process for applications is simply not feasible for an OBAAS.
The comparison to the web is impossible not to make. Some might argue that we're moving towards web sites as applications, where the browser takes over the entire device. Others are saying it's the other way around and that the future is all about apps. Personally, I think we simply don't know yet. I do think, however, that the above mentioned challenges - to vastly improve how applications are developed, discovered and publised - has to be overcome no matter if the underlying platform is a browser or a virtual machine or something else.
Thinking about a billion apps app store raises lots of questions, obstacles and opportunities. Any thoughts you have on the subject is most welcome (you need to log in to comment on this post).
Like the web, we can build this thing together. We just know need to figure out what it is first.
I just set up TwitterFeed to do automatic posting from our blogs to our Twitter account. Seems to work really well and it has all the features I need - and almost nothing else. Perfect, right?
It has:
bit.ly-API support so I can get the bit.ly stats right.
Google Analytics parameters (when posting to Twitter or URL shorteners, Google Analytics has problem catching the source of link, this is a good article about the problem).
It posts to Twitter and Facebook. We don't have a Facebook Fan page yet, but it's coming.
You can read an interview with me over at the WIP-Jam blog. It's about changes in the mobile industry and the new opportunities for developers. Do you agree with me or am I wrong? Let me know!
The telecom industry has changed dramatically the last 2-3 years. I remember a time, not long ago, when open source was more or less banned at Sony Ericsson.
That made business sense at the time, but the increasing pace of innovation has put pressure on all manufacturers to move to more open platforms. Symbian is now open source. Android is open source. The new "mother platform" of Nokia, Maemo, is based on GNU Linux and open source. Vodafone is releasing a phone based on LiMo, also open source.
Open, open, open and open. The only two major closed platforms for smartphones these days seem to be the iPhone and Windows Mobile.
Open source is about sharing and it's about community. A critical part of this community is all the developers who devote their time and their brain power to building applications or even working with the platforms themselves without being associated with the device manufacturers in any other way than as a user of their phones. When there are so many platforms to pick and choose from it's up to the developer to decide which one gets her attention.
This is a significant change compared to the days before Open.
Back then (and remember, this was only 1-2 years ago!) you secured an innovative and attractive mobile phone platform by pouring money into internal development. It was 100% about putting money in the right place. You basically bought success.
Not anymore.
The attention and time and brain power of the developers can not be bought. At least not as easily as before. You have to earn it. You have to have products that people feel for. In order to unleash the innovative power of your users, they have to like you, even love you in some sense of the word.
Of course it helps to give them access to millions of buyers through an app store but that is only part of the answer. And of course money is still important. But it's not only money. Somewhere in the mix love is a factor, perhaps one of the most important ones.
That's why mobile phones are excellent cameras. They make it possible to capture moments like this (Satio sample video of a very special moment).
The quality of the Satio photos is also quite good.
But that's not the point of this post. It's never been easier to document your life, to tell and spread stories about your life. What happens to our culture and our history when an ever larger portion of our lives are being stored and indexed and tagged and becoming always accessible a simple click away?
Andrew has touched on the subject of identity a few times. This is closely linked with what you define as your private sphere, your close circle of friends, your family. Who you know and what you are. While we are sharing our lives with our private sphere at the same time we are building the story of our culture. Facebook has 2 billion photos uploaded each month.
It starts with a camera that is always there. Fragments of your life shared with your friends or accessible to everyone. These fragments, when added together, give us a stream of our culture. It's like a pouring rainfall of memories and moments.
When you look at how the mobile phone is changing the world, there are many ways that's happening. Maybe it's not that apparent today, but in the future when someone will write the history of our time, all those moments will still be there.
If you, as a mobile developer, could design a mobile from scratch, what would it look like? What features would it have? Would it be the mobile equivalent of the batmobile above? Or would it look like this concept model from Leonard Low:
A modern mobile phone is full of compromises. A battery only lasts so long. A screen can only be of a certain size. Operators have their requirements and the user has their. But you're a developer. You have your needs. What's your dream mobile?
Daniel Ek, the CEO of music application Spotify, had an open Q&A over Twitter the other day. I of course had to ask if they planned to build a Java ME version of their Spotify Mobile client and you can read the reply here.
In short: no, they're not. The reason: the poor usability of Java ME applications.
Now, that's interesting. What does he mean? Is he referring to the MIDP UI classes with their well known limitations? Probably not. There are many good alternatives to the built in UI classes, like the free LWUIT or our own UI component library.
No, it's not the application itself that's usually the problem for Java ME applications. It's everything around the application. Simple things such as where to find the application you just installed in the menu system in the phone. Or all the hated popup dialogs (yes, we hate them too, at least from a usability point of view).
Now, I actually think that Daniel is not entirely correct. You can build user friendly java applications and I'm pretty sure Spotify would run nicely on our phones should they choose to build it. But I can certainy understand why he doesn't think so.
Java on mobile phones has got a bad rep. From the outside, it's a jungle of devices and fragmentation problems. Sony Ericsson has tried hard to minimize fragmentation within our own handsets and I think in many ways we have succeeded. There's still much to improve, though, and we are not finished until companies such as Spotify choose Java ME as the natural choice for mobile application development.
Updated: of course, feedback and comments are appreciated so please share your thoughts!
Last year I was at three weddings.They were all great of course and I loved watching some of my best friends getting married. Most, if not all, cultures of the world have a ritual like the wedding. Like every tradition the wedding ceromony is evolving slowly. A visitor from a 100 years ago would probably feel at home in all three of the weddings I went to (except probably in the dancing in the party afterwards - eurotechno and disco wasn't very big in the early 1900s) .
There's a certain template used at a wedding. Everyone in the same culture knows what a wedding is supposed to be like. What you're supposed to do and what you're supposed to wear.
Then someone breaks the rules, posts it on Youtube and gets 17 million views and counting.
I bet most people who watches that video thinks the same thing: "wow, that's a great wedding!". Maybe their view of what a wedding is supposed to be like have changed. Jill and Kevin probably didn't intend to, but they may have changed weddings forever.
That's what can happen when you break the rules.
Mobile applications and content does not carry the same "cultural luggage" (I don't mean that in a bad sense, of course, simply that mobile apps haven't been around that long) as weddings but there are still rules and templates for what a mobile application is supposed to be like. What it's supposed to do, how it's supposed to behave.
Maybe it's time to start dancing and break some rules.
The Ocarina iPhone application is a good example. It turns your phone into a flute. A flute! Crazy and brilliant at the same time.
I really hope we'll see some innovative applications submitted to our application store. Something that changes mobile applications forever. We have the music, are you ready to dance?
Updated: David Wood over at the Symbian Blog has written an excellent post on possible mobile game-changers. Good discussion in the comments as well.
I'm trying to set up automagic posts of links collected at Delicious to our Wordpress blog but I can't get it to work. There's a built in autopost feature in Delicious but it doesn't post anything. (Here's our Delicious account, by the way.)
What I want is daily posts of the links we've collected, including the notes. Guess I will have to find another way of doing the daily link posts. Any suggestions?
The summer in Sweden is the best part of the year. What better way to end it than to go to an island in the Blekinge archipelago together with 250 web geeks for the Sweden Social Web Camp? Hope to see you there!
I'm the community manager at Sony Ericsson Develop World. On this blog I will write a bit more personal thoughts about the mobile industry. I also post at blogs.sonyericsson.com, our blog about the Sony Ericsson developer community. That blog is about you, the people building cool stuff for our phones. This blog is a little bit more about me.
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