Guest post by “AT&T chief Randall Stephenson in an event at Mobile World Congress on Tuesday called for a system that let users keep app ownership across platforms . He argued it was frustrating that buying an app on one platform didn’t give you the rights to the app on another. He saw solutions such as the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) or HTML5 as being better models, although few phones actually support WAC or use HTML5 in a major way for apps.”
There really only are few software titles even on the PC that are bought for all platforms at the same time.
I guess we can count the games on Steam that are for Mac/Windows. Postal 2 comes to mind as having Linux/Mac/Windows. Terminus also released one copy for all. Maya comes with all three as well, if I recall.
I don’t see this being universally accepted anytime soon. Screw Mobile Apps, I wish it’d be that way for all Intel based games.
Publishers like getting paid over and over for the same crap (regardless if it’s actually the same software package or not, they get paid for making the same game with new art all the time.)
Won’t someone please think of the developers!!?!
Well, not the only-pay once.
But run on Symbian, MeeGo, Android, Windows Phone, iOS, Blackberry.
Too bad it won’t happen
Well, part of what goes along with healthy competition is having apps that only run on one platform or another. Without that distinction, there really wouldn’t be much difference between platforms. It’s kind of like having certain games that only run on one console, such as Halo on Xbox, God of War on Playstation, Mario on Nintendo, etc.
That’s why I’ve always said that it’s not the platform that matters, but what you can run on it.
That’s doable.
I’m talking the “book file” not the reader. Amazon has an x-platform reader, I want an x-platform book that works on all the readers.
For now, I limit myself to books I can get for free, which are de facto portable. The books I can buy shouldn’t be limited by the reader I choose.
Music today, Books tomorrow…who knows.
Strip the DRM.
And guess who AT&T think would make a great middleman for cross platform apps. Note, I did not RTFA, so this statement is rooted entirely in pessimism.
Original iPhone…
What´s stopping any app creator from linking user data from X app store purchases, such that the same user gets a voucher to get for free (or cheap) versions of the same app from other app stores for other platforms? (appstores selling for multiple platforms would just be less stops to worry about) Of course, it needs to be availalbe for multiple platforms, but that´s do able for many apps.
Hang on, we’re talking about the same organisation that locks down their phones, locks out the ability to move from one carrier to another getting up at a conference talking about the virtues of portability? excuse me but why the heck would anyone take this guy seriously? Honestly – in NZ we get parallel imported phones that are supposedly unlocked from AT&T and I can’t believe how gimped the phones are that American customers have to put up with as being ‘perfectly acceptable’.
As for portability – it is up to the individual software companies who write such applications to offer ‘cross grades’ to customers (as Adobe does when people move from PC to Mac and vice versa) or the alternative being the more extensive use of web applications – either way the solution exists already and one sure as hell doesn’t need a hypocrite like Randall Stephenson giving his 5cents worth on the matter.