Synopsis: The point of this article is not that smart phones are going to make innovations made by mobile 2.0 irrelevant, but that web properties will use their branding to leverage a position on mobile phones, which will become easier to develop for.
Every once in a while I get to take a break from TechCrunch and moonlight at MobileCrunch, which covers the clusterf@$K that is mobile 2.0. The US is a third world country when it comes to mobile phones. The market is a minefield of standards compliance problems and uncooperative carriers.
However, this will not always be the case. My sense is that the mobile platform will open up to the desktop web standards we know and love, squeezing out the mobile 2.0 startups the designing around today’s problems.
How mobile is today:
Versizon, Cingular/ATT, and Sprint/Nextel currently splitting three quarters of the market [via Chetan Sharma]. Verizon is a walled garden, and the others don’t seem much better. Content deals in the carrier business are still done at the higher levels and face to face. Deals to get deck placement can cost millions, which startups don’t have.
There are 5 mobile operating systems: Symbian (70% ish), Linux (15% ish), Windows, Palm OS (recently steered toward Linux, though), and Blackberry [warning, via Wikipedia]. On top of that there are hundreds of different flashy new phones getting cranked out every day, each with their own frustratingly different screen resolutions. Just imagine designing a web app for a screen that could be anywhere from 800×600 to 1680×1050, with the programmatic sophistication of notepad (WAP). It’s hard to make something that works for everyone. Mobile carriers have bemoaned the differences.
So, mobile 2.0 companies have glommed on to the de facto open standards of the time, Java and Symbian. Design for the platform serving the majority of the market, Symbian, and all is good right? Well, designing for Symbian doesn’t give you access to all Symbian users, it only gives you the chance to be installed on a phone (unlike the internet, where any browser can access a web page once published). Distribution of your application is a huge problem, which leads back to the first problem of the carriers.
How mobile will be:
In a few years time the above problems will be irrelevant. The important platform in mobile won’t be the operating system, but the browser. WAP standards are changing to incorporate more of the powerful communication paradigms embraced by the desktop web. The smart phones that can understand these new standards are being shipped in droves (15.9m Symbian smartphones shipped by licensees in Q1 2007, a 35.9% increase on Q1 2006 (Q1 2006 - 11.7m) [via]).
The adoption of these standards will remove the competitive advantage currently enjoyed by mobile startups who are making rich mobile applications. Desktop web based companies will be able to leverage the relationships and content from their sites into a principle place on your mobile phone.
May 19th, 2007 at 2:10 am
“Symbian (70% ish), Linux (15% ish), Windows, Palm OS …, and Blackberry”
No, not really. This list is only for smartphone OSs. Most phones run (so called) proprietary systems, so Symbian rather has
May 19th, 2007 at 2:14 am
Also, only a few phones support a browser with Javascript today. It will increase quickly no doubt, but it’s still a fact that even with AJAX support in phones there’s little possibility to access phone-specific features like taking pictures, recording videos, communicating via Bluetooth, NFC etc. Things that are essential to providing useful mobile applications/services.
May 19th, 2007 at 11:20 am
Well, the idea is that the market of smartphones, although small, will grow, and that these phones will be able to run more sophisticated browsers that will take over a lot of the phone to web communications (maps, email, updating blogs). There are phone specific widgets that are trying to do this today. I don’t think I’ve seen a phone program get over the distribution hump. It’’s way harder to get on to people’s phones than in their browser because the phone lacks the promotional framework to share new services and also the ability to easily see the value of the apps when they require a download and install.
As pictures and videos. I see those as the input methods for the phone that should integrate with the browser. Putting pictures online should be like typing into your keyboard.
May 24th, 2007 at 6:24 am
Broadband on mobiles is the worst enemy of Mobile 2.0
May 25th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
“Well, the idea is that the market of smartphones, although small, will grow”
Predictions of smartphones taking over is the worst enemy of Mobile 2.0. Seriously.
Mobile 2.0 works today via SMS, MMS, MIDlets etc, if the definition is user-generated content.
May 25th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
I think it’s ludicrous that we have to pay SMS fees for what should be a data charge.
May 27th, 2007 at 5:10 am
Content discovery / distribution: a huge barrier, you’re right.
Extending web 2.0 to the phone: well, one day, but not soon (see techype.blogspot.com/2007/05/proof-mobile-ajax-only-works-in.html)
Everything else: er, no. The way you describe platforms is completely false and very unhelpful, unless you only want to sell to mobile geeks. As Anders tried to say (but appears to have been cropped) - smart phones are a tiny portion of the market (4-8%, I forget the actual figures), and the main reason they are growing right now (particularly in Europe) are 1) Nokia S60 phones are being pushed more mainstream whilst still being labelled ’smartphone’, and 2) Operators are still pushing out Windows mobile devices with their own brands on them. These are ’smartphones by stealth’ - the users generally don’t know they’re smartphones, and don’t appear to care much.
Also, when quoting Symbian (and Linux) shipment figures in the context of smartphone OSs, always factor out the DoCoMo phones, which greatly reduces the numbers; DoCoMo phones use these OSs under the hood, but the phone is totally locked down so you can only access 3rd party dynamic content through DoJa or FlashLite.
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