FEATURE APPLICATIONS
The big question is whether these existing channels, left to a ‘let
100 flowers bloom’ model, will be able to maintain, or in some cases regain, quality.
at Adobe Systems. “For agencies and publishers we’ve now come out of the era of using marketing budgets to simply join the crowd on iOS. Brands are now starting to measure their successes and optimise their spend. We also know that mobile budgets are not growing, so brands are looking for ways to reach more devices with the same cost and that’s where HTML and cross-platform technologies come in.” In November, Adobe called time on Flash
Player for mobile devices, ending development on the browser plugin following the release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and Black- Berry PlayBook. Doherty says that HTML5 is certainly one path forward, although it will take years to produce widely consistent web standards necessary to support everything required by the creative and publishing industries in HTML. Meanwhile standalone applications can still be built using Flash tooling and targeting with Adobe AIR across iOS, Android, Blackberry, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and other devices. “It turned out that content owners just weren’t that interested in optimising Flash content for mobile browsers, but they are keen to build applications and so Adobe is supporting that model,” Doherty says. While Flash is being refocused towards pre- mium video and gaming experiences and other use cases that would be impractical or impossible with HTML, Doherty points out that, with larger screens such as those appearing on tablets, users hunt for—and find—different content. On the flip side, more of those large screens are coming on line, partly due to the success of the iPad but more because Android inherently lowers the barrier of entry for newcomers to the tablet and mobile devices scene. And with the most successful application stores run by a mixture of web entities and device OEMs, the operator looks somewhat shut out of the ecosys- tem, according to Paul Buchheit, an ex-Google developer credited with the creation of Gmail as well as the company’s “Don’t be evil” motto. “The carriers are such a roadblock to in-
novation a lot of times and Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Facebook are all in this re-
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ally aggressive war with each other and they’ve all got a lot of money. If something like buying a carrier gave one of them a leg up in terms of offering services it may well make a lot of sense. But right now things are held back a lot of times by carriers trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of the industry. Look at how long the iPhone was stuck on AT&T’s network while Android got a huge opening by being available on Verizon,” he says. In Buchheit’s crystal ball, the mobile plat-
form space will be a two horse race between Apple and Android. “Android has so much momentum and its free—it has a negative cost so how do you compete with that? And Apple is just a better experience. So what room does that leave for any other players?” Vodafone’s Lee Epting believes that users exploring the device default to an app-centric world and, while widgets as a concept are becoming increasingly dynamic, you get more richness from native apps. “I have yet to see one new paradigm put another paradigm to death. Just look at Java,” she says. “It’s still a primary breadwinner for a lot of app developers today and is a mainstream in the emerging markets. Java will still be around for some time because people with feature phones will want content too. “Developers are living in a mixed soup, so we
are saying a curated app shop is what will matter to the next wave of smartphone users,” she says. “We’re going after an existing channel—Android Market—and saying let’s have a curated store within that, but also let’s hit the browser and have a widget framework with real time updates.” But another player that has seen reasonable success as an app development platform, as well as managing to cosy up to the operators and the device vendors is Facebook, a social network that has been smart in its packaging of APIs, and very successful in integrating social gaming and driving brand awareness through applications. Take Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), which in
October, launched a self-care app for Facebook, allowing operators’ customers to personally
manage their fixed and mobile telecom services from their phones. The app enables end users to check their balance, buy special offers and subscribe to services from their respective service providers. It also hits a sweet spot with operators by setting up a self-care platform, freeing up the carrier’s in house resources. Henri Moissinac, head of mobile business
at Facebook, says he doesn’t see Facebook as a “rival” development platform because a lot of the things done for mobile developers recently are on top of Android or iOS. “So we’re making these platforms more and more relevant for develop- ers. We’re making them social, focusing on social apps. So rival isn’t right but we’re starting on Android and iPhone and trying to spread out into other platforms,” he says. In one sense the firm walks a fine line because it relies on the carriers and handset manufac- turers to push the social network to the users. But Moissinac does reveal that the company is trying to push the envelope with regards to specific experiences that pitch Facebook more as a handset UI. “You can sync your address book with Facebook and for some devices and users maybe that will be the only address book that they use,” he says, conceding that the proposition might not be attractive for “the entire world”. For Facebook, in a mobile environment at
least, its greatest traction comes through the apps, on various platforms, as every time a user migrates from the mobile site to the app Moissinac says the company sees “engagement going through the roof” due to a better and faster experience. Yet he also sees potential for a more intelligent browser. In fact, the consensus is that native apps, widgets and rich web sites will co-exist for some time to come. The big question is whether these existing channels, left to a ‘let 100 flowers bloom’ model, will be able to maintain, or in some cases regain, quality. The users hold all the trump cards and will take the simplest option. But this doesn’t mean the most permissive player will take the lead, rather the most shrewd cultivator of those pieces of content. n
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