We're living in an interesting time for anyone selling mobile applications and services. This particular slice of the telecomms value chain is getting a little shaken up, in ways which I believe will ultimately be good for both consumers and the industry.

Today in Europe we have 2 significant platforms on which to develop apps and services and 2 worthwhile means of distribution. The platforms are mobile web and J2ME, and the means of distribution are via portal or by text-message response (text in a keyword to a shortcode, get a link to the application back).

Yes, there are others; Flash, Python, BREW, widget runtimes and native applications all have their place - but none have the audience that J2ME and mobile web deliver. And distribution is possible via Bluetooth and sideloading of applications from PCs, but at Future Platforms we're not seeing this happen in great numbers (with the exception of GetJar, who snuck under my own personal radar and seem to be doing very well, judging from their figures).

I have a suspicion that this is about to change - and it pains me to join the chorus of folks bleating that the iPhone seems to be leading the way. When I first got hold of a (jailbroken) device last year, I was impressed by the third-party installer for applications, which at the time offered the best experience I'd seen for distributing mobile content. Apple have improved on it significantly with their own version: the iTunes App Store.

At a time when much of the mobile industry in Europe seems content to whine endlessly about the twin bugbears of device fragmentation and operator revenue shares, it's refreshing to see a new entrant arrive, do things differently, and publish numbers demonstrating success. We don't tend to see figures for application downloads from operator portals or third parties here in the UK, I assume probably because the numbers aren't good enough to impress. In contrast, Apple have announced 60 million downloads by August 2008. A few smaller developers are also revealing their figures.

Now there's a slight difficulty comparing numbers here because the App Store aggregates upwards of a million potential customers from across all the operators selling iPhones (one per territory right now, I believe); so we can't just compare these figures to, say, those for Orange UK (were Orange UK to release figures). But they still indicate there's a significant marketplace here; remember that with Apple taking 30% of revenue rather than the traditional 50% common in Europe, and providing all distribution (instead of app providers having to do their own or go via an aggregator) the margins are higher. And I'm honour-bound to point out that this is for a single device - so no porting costs (though higher costs for initial development, with Cocoa/C++ apps being more technically complex than J2ME - another post on that coming soon).

I'm frankly astonished that Apple have managed to enter an industry, partner with the incumbents and smoothly route around them in this way - though I'm not privy to commercial agreements between operators and Apple, which might provide a revenue stream back to them I suppose. It looks like classic "divide and conquer" to me, and leaves Apple owning the customer's mobile data experience (if not traffic), whilst their operator partners keep control over voice calls and text messaging.

If you work in mobile right now, you'll be as sick as me of everyone bleating about the importance of mobile user experience - as though it suddenly became an issue the day that Apple launched their Big Shiny. But obviously it plays a role. And Google seem to be following suit withe their Android "marketplace" (so much less materialistic than calling it a "store", doncha know) - though with the existing mobile industry customising Android to its hearts content, how watered down this is by the time it reaches consumers is a completely different matter.

My best-case outcome for Android: the mobile industry wakes up, sees Apple, craps itself and starts unashamedly lifting the best bits of the iPhone model in customising Android devices. It does a reasonable job, producing handsets 75% as good as iPhone and selling them well.

My worst-case outcome for Android: operators and handset vendors buy it, lobotomise it to fit into the way they've always done things, and it ends up in the same cupboard as SavaJe.

But what a fun time to be working in mobile applications (which, plug plug, is where my company sits): good commercial results, an industry being shaken up, and the largest handset vendor in the world (Nokia) moving in a similar direction with Ovi. After seeing a few presentations over the last year where accepted wisdom was that there's no future in applications (and knowing full well this isn't the case - I have some fantastic figures to post here when I get permission), it's good to see a sacred cow or two get slaughtered in Cupertino.

Is it just me, or is it slightly strange that:

1. Twitter is a business built on lifting an artificial constraint from another medium (140-character posts, suspiciously close to the 160-character limit we know and love in SMS);

2. Meanwhile, there's a vast amount of whingeing going on about how it's deeply unfair that Twitter is turning off mobile updates... all because it's constrained by a different aspect of SMS: cost-per-message-sent;

3. This latter aspect of SMS has probably let to a better ecosystem of profitable businesses (i.e. pretty well the whole mobile content industry from ringtones onwards, let along the direct person-to-person messaging revenues) than most Web 2.0 startups will ever hope to;
   

See also Fred Wilsons lovely post on constraints and why businesses ought to embrace them:

"I believe constraints are key to building great web apps. I am not sure about rules that are dictated by the market or government. But the reality of the place we are in is that we have to deal with them. And the best entrepreneurs will figure out how to play these rules to their advantage."

Quote of the day:

Like watching an old man curse and scream at the weather, watching webheads complain about the idiosyncrasies of mobile as if they were only that - mere irrelevant idiosyncrasies - can be a test of patience.

See also Eternal September 2.0

There's a very interesting presentation from Alan Cooper at Agile2008 here - I'd encourage you to go and read it. In the past (particularly when reading The Inmates Are Taking Over The Asylum) I've been *really annoyed* by Alan - in particular with his view that developers are inherently incapable of undertaking interaction design, in quotes like

"[Programmers] struggle with this idea of making computers behave more like humans, because they see humans as weak and imperfect computing devices."

But I'm finding a lot I like in this presentation; maybe I've misunderstood him in the past, maybe he's mellowed or changed his mind:

"While interaction designers are pretty good at inventing user interfaces, lots of programmers and product managers are good at that, too."

I need to read it a few times and mull it over before I can give an impression of the whole, but there's some bits which get my bulb percolating:

1. The approach around slide 37, breaking product development into 4 stages, with the middle two (design/engineering) as agile, others as not. This implies iteration and change occurs in defined periods, not all the way through product development;
2. Slides on cognitive bias (as a driver for observing users, not just asking them what they want) reminded me of Duncan Pierce's skit on the subject at last years XP Day;
3. And the engineering phase sounds eerily like a development equivalent to the sketching which Mr Buxton advocates:

"You are going to write it twice anyway, whether the discarded first one is in tiny parts or one big chunk, so you might as well make the first time count for the max.   Brooks says that we will do things twice. I say we should acknowledge this truth and maximize the first time for understanding, and maximize the second time for efficiency."

I liked this quote:

"Startups should “intelligently hedge their bets across multiple platforms,” advised Richard Wong of Accel Partners. His firm has invested in mobile games and application site GetJar, “the store for the other 3 billion phones that aren’t iPhones,” as Mr. Wong put it."

+1 +1 +1

iPhone's doing a great job of getting the internet industry interested in mobile - particularly the US internet folks who've lagged behind slightly. And with the iPod Apple have a track record of entering a consumer electronics industry already carved up by incumbents (Sony Walkman anyone) and dominating, so Nokia et al can't exactly rest on their laurels.

But the idea that reaching the iPhone today gets you more than a visible, vocal, yet miniscule audience is a bit off-base. There are definitely places where it's worth putting the effort in to support it (just as there are places where it makes sense to do Symbian/Series 60 native apps), but not everywhere, not yet.

And as for the Loopt idea of using iPhone as a proving ground: it'll definitely make a fantastic demonstration (if you do it right). That said, iPhone native apps aren't cheap and simple to produce (and you can't even talk about why that is), and going straight in to support a device with large screen and fantastic UI means you're left with solving all those nasty little mobile problems when you do decide to go mass market and move beyond that single, lovely device...