Guest post by Fatal Exception’s Neil McAllister sees a glaring omission among the proposed plans for the new Application Developers Alliance for mobile app developers: any clear focus on easing cross-platform mobile development. ‘Currently, the leading mobile operating systems are all vertically integrated “walled gardens,” and developing versions of the same app for multiple platforms is both challenging and costly,’ McAllister writes. ‘That’s where an organization like the Application Developers Alliance could help. By organizing app developers from all across the mobile OS market, it could act as a unified voice to put pressure on Apple, Google, and others to lower barriers to entry for their platforms. … But as long as it’s being underwritten by leading proponents of the status quo, it seems unlikely that the Application Developers Alliance would rock the boat by taking a stand against walled-garden-style mobile platforms.’
I fully support the goals of app portability, the development situation today is a far cry from what anyone would call ideal. But, short of Ronald Reagan coming back from the grave to motivate us to tear down the digital walls, I think modern corporations are inclined to push for the exact opposite.
And, hm, by naivete almost provoking a “digital apocalypse” early in the process? ;p ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83 )
Maybe also (depending on one’s views) really mostly just “free-riding” on opportune circumstances and already in-motion dynamics ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Todd ); most of the really hard work (of preventing a collapsing empire from unleashing its weapons – can we be certain other nuclear states would be able to do the same?) done by somebody else (Gorbachev? Maybe sort of betrayed afterwards when it comes to supposed informal promise of not expanding NATO eastwards / keeping those as buffer states in the style of Finland or Austria; or earlier, when the supposedly promised help in later stages of Soviet economic reforms was declined – yet still, no war happened); or the leftover mess of economic myths… (“predatory” big corporations and their digital walls could be partly seen as expression of those)
Edited 2012-01-13 00:15 UTC
Looks like a job for JavaME…
or Qt (via Lighthouse)
Or Mono.
Or javascript. With some “local webapps” standard of course, including CSS and so on… you know it’s inevitable ;p (actually, I remember such W3 standard for widgets – even implemented in more recent Symbian handsets, I think)
If all developers in the Application Developers Alliance were to agree to make choosing platforms simpler/cheaper by allowing their customers to move their paid Apps between iOS and Android etc.., they would greatly enhance their prospects for success in establishing some sane, cross platform common App solutions. So too, independent third party App’s stores and/or an Alliance version should be encouraged and supported as viable alternatives to the growing list of platform specific App portals that are becoming ever more tightly locked-down by the day. Apple, Google, Amazon, B&N, ArchOS, etc, etc…. Even Microsoft is planning to go walled-garden for much of Windows 8’s Metro software. With either the open or locked-in model, App’s store fragmentation is inevitable. We might just as well choose to support the free-est version.
Well, if developers wanted to take the notion of portability seriously today (from a user point of view, not necessarily programming), and they WANT to differentiate themselves from others by selling fair-use apps licensed to run across all the user’s devices without committing users to vendor lock, how could they do it?
Without the approval of the…uhm..curators, it seems like a lost cause.
Ideally, the government would step in and exclaim that users have a legal right to choose their own app distributors and vendors would have a responsibility to enable them to do so.
Then the various stores would have to compete on merit.
Edited 2012-01-05 20:23 UTC
Just support the one’s who play nice now. If iOS users can move to Android and keep all their Apps but Android users can’t move to iOS with all their Apps because Apple refuses third party access, then Android obviously becomes a much better value. Starkly so. Developers should probably only allow this app portability to platforms that allow access to a/their open, yet curated community portal. This would likely break the lock-out. Do you think Apple will sit still for one-way portability if it isn’t in their favor?
Unless the App developer community wants to continue to be treated like these walled-garden’s bitches, they’d better figure out a way to join forces with a generic, community solution. App portability being made available to only those who play nice is an extremely big stick.
Also, make sure that this paid app portability works with all jail broken devices too. It’ll be like getting paid to jail-break your iDevices.
Edited 2012-01-05 21:33 UTC
How come is the actual mobile situation any different from the 50-80’s with each computer having a different architecture and the applications being developed in Assembly or in vendor specific languages?
Or the console market where each game has to be specifically made for the target platform?
Even the desktop shares the same issues.
If I want to make an application that stands out, it needs to take advantage of what the platforms offers, being it at hardware of software level. This can be eased with some kind of portability layer, but there are some limits.
I think some developers nowadays are just spoiled.
The point is that for lots of software, platform specific advantages simply don’t matter.
First the industry has successfully converged on a single CPU arch and computing arch for mobile so no platform has advantages couldn’t be theoretically replicated on the other.
Second the processing capabilities of those its enough to cater for some portability related overhead.
Most dev env. differences seem to be artificial, with more intentions toward vendor lock in than innovation. I definitely see some j2me equivalent having a significant role here.
Really? What single CPU architecture?
Could be referring to CPUs with cores derived from ARM licences, although I’m not sure they’d constitute a “single CPU architecture” in the way x86 is regarded.
Not even really so much on consoles any more – not since quite a few cross-platform engines target most/all platforms (and… it’s almost like that on mobiles, by now)
Or since Xbox development is largely in line with Windows “by design” …what I think spearheaded the above, and ended up a little “funny” – I remember how, a decade+ ago, virtually all “very PC” publications (typically almost slandering more traditional consoles) for some reason hailed the new arrival as ~”finally a good console” …yeah, and one which made hybrid* games targeting both kinds of platforms (suboptimally for both) just too sensible business-wise to not do it.
*that’s what they are, hybrids, not “console ports” – the influence from quirks of each platform goes “bad” both ways. Come on, ~FPPs becoming quite dominant (or at least to some detriment, neglect of more traditional console genres, which just don’t work on mouse & kb) on consoles, and largely just because the standard input device on the other type of platform is one meant for pointing at things? (so, of course, many games and their UIs are built around the simple mechanic of… pointing at things)
I don’t know… quite a few games in Xbox Live Indie Games do stand out – and they are made in XNA (essentially a click away from making a Windows or Windows Phone version)
Edited 2012-01-12 22:57 UTC