Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

Mobile software development first took off with the Palm OS platform, which was astonishingly successful at creating an ecosystem of small companies producing software, accessories and peripherals. Unfettered by wireless carrier business models since its evolution into the first successful smartphone platform was still a few years away, the original Palm OS and the PDAs that it powered made it tremendously open and easy for folks like myself to hang out their online "shingle" and start selling applications or custom application development to anyone who was interested.

Those days are gone and are unlikely to return. The reasons are well known to most of us and there's little point in rehearsing them in this blog post. If you want to be in the game, suck it up and learn what it takes now. The biggest challenge to a small company or individual developer first looking into the mobile market, or an old-school mobile dev looking to adapt to the new world: simply understanding the bewildering new platform landscape and all the hidden costs and hurdles of targeting each platform.

My good friend and Palm software veteran Justine Pratt at Creative Algorithms (run with her husband Corey) has done a great service to new entrants by producing an impressive matrix comparing all the major platforms—as well as some you probably didn't know about but should—in about 30 dimensions, both technical and market-related. Particularly helpful are the comparisons around digital signing requirements, benefits and costs, and around the various app stores: submission costs, commission rates. If you're not aware of the off-device distribution channels and which platforms they support, she covers these as well. Finally, she has provided estimates of the market size and the number of device models for each platform.

Making the right decision about what platforms to target with your application requires, in my view, some deeper intuitions about the platforms than could ever be captured by such a matrix. Some platforms are much better for certain kinds of apps than others, and you should not forget that each platform attracts different types of users. Also some platform vendors and app stores are better channel partners than others depending on their internal culture and their interest and experience in really supporting third party developers. But the information Justine has gathered is foundational and indispensable for such business decisions, and I'm surprised to say that I've not seen it all collected in one place anywhere until now. Justine is quick to call this a work in progress—as is the mobile landscape it aims to summarize. But grab the PDF off of Creative Algorithm's web site here and see if you don't agree that she's done us all a great service today.

Update: For updates on the document, follow Justine on Twitter.