Which Phone To Develop For?

Rob MacKenzie writes "I have to decide on a mobile phone to develop for. We're building a house with some automation built in, and we want the mobile phone to be able to control certain aspects of it, and retrieve information on what's going on in the house. Our choices are the usual suspects: Apple's IPhone, RIM's Blackberry, Nokia's line (Symbian), any Android phone we can get in Canada, J2ME generic app, or a Web-based UI we would interact with in the phone's browser. What would you choose if you had to go with one? Which exact model? We will be buying a few to develop for, so price is a bit of an issue."

Comments

I'd go iPhone:

[nweaver]

You can target the iPod touch as well as the iPhone, and can develop on the iPod touch as well as the iPhone ($220 development platforms with no per-month cost).

You have some very interesting features (accelerometer, GPS, camera) which make for some particularly interesting ideas

You have a large installed base thats still growing rapidly.

And apple takes only a 30% cut of revenue, in exchange for a nice distribution mechanism.

Re:I'd go iPhone:

[geekoid]

"And apple takes only a 30"

Only?

Re:I'd go iPhone:

[SanityInAnarchy]

You're practically self-parodying here...

You can target the iPod touch as well as the iPhone, and can develop on the iPod touch as well as the iPhone ($220 development platforms with no per-month cost).

Excluding, of course, the per-month AT&T contract.

You have some very interesting features (accelerometer, GPS, camera) which make for some particularly interesting ideas

All of which exist on other phones.

You have a large installed base thats still growing rapidly.

vs, say, J2ME, which has a huge install base that shows no signs of collapsing.

And apple takes only a 30% cut of revenue, in exchange for a nice distribution mechanism.

"Only" 30%? And they can pull the plug on your app any time they want.

All you've managed to do so far is to show that it could work, not why it's better than anything else.

Re:I'd go iPhone:

[bjackson1]

You're practically self-parodying here...

You can target the iPod touch as well as the iPhone, and can develop on the iPod touch as well as the iPhone ($220 development platforms with no per-month cost).

Excluding, of course, the per-month AT&T contract.

You have some very interesting features (accelerometer, GPS, camera) which make for some particularly interesting ideas

All of which exist on other phones.

You have a large installed base thats still growing rapidly.

vs, say, J2ME, which has a huge install base that shows no signs of collapsing.

And apple takes only a 30% cut of revenue, in exchange for a nice distribution mechanism.

"Only" 30%? And they can pull the plug on your app any time they want.

All you've managed to do so far is to show that it could work, not why it's better than anything else.

Excluding, of course, the per-month AT&T contract.

Yep, last time I used my iPod Touch I had to pay AT&T. Learn to read, please. You have some good points about J2ME, but spouting off non-sense doesn't help.

Re:I'd go iPhone:

[FreeBSD evangelist]

Considering that they are taking care of all the billing, credit card processing, accounting and running the distribution/download site, yeah. I'd call that "only".

Re:I'd go iPhone:

[omeomi]

That's like arguing against the J2ME platform because all those phones are different and have different features.

That's an excellent argument against the J2ME platform, and I've developed applications for J2ME, Android, and iPhone. With iPod Touch and iPhone, at least you have a good idea of the baseline capabilities of the device you're developing for. With J2ME, the devices are so different--and the providers configure them so differently--that you develop and test on a handful of different phones, finally get it to work on all of them, send it to a friend with yet another phone, and...it doesn't work. So you figure out what's wrong on his phone, and then you send it to another friend...and...it doesn't work. It's horribly frustrating. At least with the iPhone, you know if it works on your 3G iPhone, and it works on your original iPhone, it'll work everywhere. Hopefully Android will turn out to be somewhat similar. We'll only really know when there are a number of different Android phones available from different companies and different providers.

Re:I'd go iPhone:

[EXMSFT]

You're kidding, right? Apple gives you a complete retail channel with a storefront and an end-to-end transaction that is brain-dead easy for the consumer, and leaves nearly nothing for the ISV to do besides make software, sign agreements, and "pay rent". You'd lose nearly as much if not more to a brick and mortar big-box store if you were wholesaling to them - and then you have to set up an entire retail channel - which ain't easy. People keep underestimating the value that Apple gives in this deal.

web based

[thetoadwarrior]

That way you can control things with or without the phone. Give it a simple interface and then you can use any phone or device with the web page.

YOu've missed the point

[geekoid]

Technology is becoming agnostic.
Build a 'phone' ready web page and stop worrying which device will connect to it.

Re:YOu've missed the point

[UnanimousCoward]

If you build a web app, it might not be able to take advantage of the phone's hardware, like the GPS. I originally built a web app but bit the bullet and wrote a native iPhone app for this very reason.

J2ME or Web

[jaminJay]

Seriously consider using either J2ME or Web-based content. You can never rely on any one thing, but standards like these should allow you to change target platforms more easily in the future when the company you've chosen to follow either busts or, more likely, drops one of the features you've relied upon and you have a large amount of rework ahead of you.

(My fantasies always revolved around the Palm, but that was the standard when those dreams began).

iPhone and OS X

[BWJones]

The cool thing about developing for the iPhone is that you are *essentially* also developing for OS X. So its almost a twofer.

Re:iPhone and OS X

[jeremyp]

Wrong.

The basic principles are the same (it's all Objective-C and Cocoa), but the GUI SDK for the iPhone is not the same as that of a normal OS X GUI application.

You'll live in the house for decades...

[swb]

...but how long will any mobile phone technology last? Will you find yourself having to re-do it all every 5 years as phone/carrier makers obsolete what you developed for?

Web based makes sense since you could possibly transition to some other technology, or, more likely, a mobile device's web access will only get better making it in-place upgradable for a long time.

Building your software to target a specific phone technology just seems terribly shortsighted for something like a house.

(IMHO, the real answer is "none" -- home automation is of limited value past a programmable thermostat and ultimately an albatross of shit that doesn't work and is expensive and time-consuming to fix. Its frightfully expensive to maintain ordinary systems like windows, gutters, and roofs, let alone a whole complex automation system).

Re:You'll live in the house for decades...

[vux984]

Web based makes sense since you could possibly transition to some other technology, or, more likely, a mobile device's web access will only get better making it in-place upgradable for a long time.

I'd teir it. A web service tier that does all the actual work. A web based front end, lowest common denominator UI for any device including a laptop, it uses the web service to get things actually done.

Then you can just build a phone UI directly against the web service for any device you want a more 'slick mobile application' for than accessing it via the web.

iPhone: low hanging fruit...

[AliasMarlowe]

>

You have a large installed base thats still growing rapidly.

A good fraction of said installed base has money to spend. All of them have a track record of being separated from their money with only moderate effort.

And separating other people from their money is the primary motivation for going into any business.

Because you're locked in

[dreamchaser]

Except with many smartphones you aren't locked into a single point of sale. There are plenty of very good Windows Mobile applications that vendors sell directly to the consumer, for example.

Re:You're missing one.

[DECS]

Problem with Windows Mobile: the software market is dysfunctional: no central app store like Apple for at least another year, sites like Handango take 40-70% of your revenues, and WiMo market share is dying. Dropped from 24% in 2004 to 12% this year. Look at apps that are available: ugly, expensive, and lame-o. Consumers aren't attracted to that, and the installed base is falling apart. Microsoft sold 18 million in the last year, not even twice as many as the iPhone, except that the iPhone is one platform; all the WiMo devices are slightly different, with different features and capabilities, from non-touch tiny Smartphone screens to larger Palm-style Pocket PC form factors.

Look at RIM: Apple just passed them in sales this quarter. RIM sells replacement phones to a relatively slow growing base (19 million subscribers total, again less than double Apple's sales this year). Its installed base is also spread across a variety of different models.

Palm is dead.

Symbian is big but struggling. Difficult to develop for, has the same problems with marketing apps as WiMo. Nokia sells a lot of phones, but most don't run Symbian but only the feature phone Nokia OS. It's Symbian products are split between different hardware types, and the overall Symbian market is currently split between three platforms.

Flash Lite and Java struggle to run on hundreds of slightly different phones, which all have the same software marketing problems. Android is basically just a semi-consistent version of Java ME, the hardware will still be all over the place. Installed base is currently very small, and the G1 isn't going to help in that regard.

Apple's iPhone has a single installed base of over ten million units, and growing dramatically. It has a wildly profitable marketing system for software, good development tools that share a lot in common with Mac development, and a customer base that spends money. There is no real variation in hardware to deal with, nor problems between the software/hardware vendor.

So if you want to do mobile software to make a political statement, or because you like a certain technology, or just want to keep yourself busy, you have several options. If you want to make money, you write iPhone software and sell it to the ten million iPhone users and several million other iPod touch users.

Five More iPhone Myths
Myth 6: iPhone Developers will Flock to Android
Myth 7: iPhone Buyers will Flock to Android
Myth 8: iPhone will lose out to Steve Ballmer's Windows Mobile 7 in 2010
Myth 9: iPhone Unable to Penetrate Europe Due to Symbian Dominance
Myth 10: RIM's BlackBerry Will Contain iPhone Expansion