If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
This week’s carnival (#114) is hosted at Chetan Sharma’s blog. As always he has a great collection of posts. This time the focus is on the recently announced iPhone SDK. He was kind enough to include my post on the subject as well.
Thursday’s announcement from Apple was pretty impressive. I never expected to see such a complete execution of the SDK program. Apple really looked at this from a 360 degree angle and nailed almost everything:
App Development
Testing and debugging
Deployment, distribution and discoverability
Business model
VC funding for developers
Rich developer program and support
Apple’s approach to this makes anyone else look pretty pale. Compare this to Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile or any carrier’s development program. Almost everywhere else one has to deal with various parties and many restrictions before they can get their application on the phone. Apple has really offered a one stop shop to the eager developers.
However for me the fun part kinda stops there. The early excitement has somewhat waned at this point. I am sure you all know what I am talking about. The fact that Apple will not allow 3rd party background processes to run on the iPhone. This means that users cannot switch back and forth between applications seamlessly. Once you switch applications the previous one shuts down. This is a very realistic scenario where users can receive calls, text/email messages while using an application. Read more »
sb_url_to_rate = 'http://abhishek.tiwari.com/2008/03/08/iphone-sdk-the-new-walled-garden/';
sb_rated_title = 'iPhone SDK, the New Walled Garden?';
sb_when_to_load = 'immediate';
try { sb_rated_creation = new Date(Date.parse('Sat, 08 Mar 2008 18:38:25 -0500')); } catch (e) {};
sb_categories = "Apple,Mobile";
I was over at GigaOm and came across a post from the man himself. It was about the new calendar sync application from Google for BlackBerrys. Just to give you a quick background here, Google has been rapidly releasing mobile applications for the BlackBerry platform, for its favorite services. So they support GMail, Search, Picasa, Maps and News. They launched these services in early December.
So the calendar sync impresses me the most. They have smartly integrated the native BlackBerry calendar with the Google Calendar in a bi-directional fashion. So any entries added to the Google Calendar online shows up on the handset within the native view and anything added within the native view is updated online.
Tim O’Reilly of the Web 2.0 fame posted a great article on the NYT. He talks about the fact that mobile handsets are gradually becoming more and more like wireless PCs. This change along with the movement within the service provider community is forcing the”Open” mantra within the mobile landscape.
He reflects disappointment behind the fact that even though carriers are beginning to listen, they have not welcomed this with open arms (no pun intended). I am in complete agreement with his recommendation to the carriers to adopt the well established internet/PC business models.
I have mentioned this in a previous post. Carriers are inching towards the “Open” thought process versus taking the bull by the horns. Its simply a strategy where they are hedging their bets with a safe approach.
Yes I understand that they do have a lot of responsibility with the service. Even if they get past the thought that going “Open” won’t hurt their business, they are still worried about security and privacy. Carriers are concerned about the fact that Open models will lead to malicious content on the device, which results in a bad experience and increased customer support calls.
Most of you know about the infamous mobile Walled Garden, enforced by the big boys of wireless in the North American market. This approach to lock the wireless offering has led to significant frustrations for the service / application providers and subscribers alike.
The walled garden established by the carriers, allowed them to have complete / absolute control of the content and applications provided to the handset base. Application developers were at the mercy of the carrier, who essentially controlled most aspects of their business. Right from application functionality, marketing/promotions, discoverability and pricing were mandated by the carriers. Unless you as an app developer partnered with the carrier and deployed a native application (specific to their ecosystem), you had little or no chance of getting into the mobile ecosystem.
However one thing was certain, the mobile landscape was about to change. Participation from Google and other’s with the strong software background meant that carriers could no longer operate in a close environment. They would have to rethink their strategy.
Comments(4)
