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Mobile Operators Fight App Store Fragmentation
angry tapir writes "Twenty-four mobile network operators have formed the Wholesale Applications Community to avoid fragmenting the apps market and to give developers one point of entry to all the members. The Wholesale Applications Community members include: AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Telefónica, Telenor Group, Sprint, Verizon Wireless, and Vodafone." The vision seems to be eventually to create one unified app market in addition to Google's and Apple's. The article quotes an analyst noting that the mobile operators have "a poor track record with this type of industry consortium."
One thing that allows the Apple app store to be so popular is that the number of screen sizes it need to support is limited to one resolution, with a second larger screen announced but not out yet, and that'll come with a scaling tool so apps that are designed for the small screen will look okay on the bigger screen.
It seems that in order to have an app store that's cross platform, we'll need a cross platform hardware standard too. Apple's app store is a hit because it allows developers to score big with comparatively little effort, especially if the developer already knows how to program with XCode on the Mac. How does this proposed alliance claim to be able to get the same benefits?
I didn't think there was so much to raising goldfish until I went to the store to buy goldfish food. Did you know they have different food types for different varieties of goldfish? There is a separate food just for Lionheads that "enhance and grow" the bumps on the heads of these freaks. Then there is food that increases the vibrancy of certain varieties of goldfish. Not to mention that there are foods that float versus foods that sink. Flakes vs pellets. Live worms vs freeze-dried worms. Feeder fish vs 3-day time release blocks.
My goldfish had an air bladder infection and was constantly floating to the top. I ended up getting the sinking pellets because that discouraged it from eating from the surface.
My goldfish is better now, but I wonder how much more trouble it would have been if I had multiple varieties of goldfish in the same tank.
Twenty-four mobile network operators have formed the Wholesale Applications Community to avoid fragmenting the apps market and to give developers one point of entry to all the members.
You say "ah-void frag-muhn-tation of the mar-ket", I say "mohn-op-oh-lee."
Anyone want to guess how they'll leverage this? My guess is that if you piss off one mobile carrier with your app (or blame them for a problem), you'll be blocked from all of them. Plus, of course, pushing the carrier's commissions as high as possible.
Please help metamoderate.
"We plan to fight application store fragmentation, by fragmenting all of the application stores!"
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's clearly Apple vs. Google vs. Everyone else as it is. A couple of computer companies came up with novel and interesting ways to sell software on phones and now you have all the phone companies freaking out trying to figure out how to do the same thing and still compete.
Their business is telephones, not software. There really isn't any other choice the telecoms have. They know they'll be more effective working together and pooling talent, but will they deliver? I'm sure most people doubt their ability to come up with an answer, but you never know...
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
They're fighting the wrong fragmentation. The fragmentation is in the number of handset form factors, chipsets and OSes. Apple, Google, and now even Microsoft are fighting this fragmentation. Apple with total control over all form factors and OSes they use. Google with a standard OS, but less standardized form factors. And with Win Phone microsoft said they'll be vetting manufacturers more than in the past and won't allow UI skinning.
Write once, run everywhere doesn't work when the basic functionality of each device varies so much.
Mobile operators don't fight "fragmentation", what they fight is their loss of control. With Android and iPhone, the era of operator-controlled feature phones is coming to an end even in the US. They don't want to become the dumb pipes and commodity service that by all rights they should become.
Wireless companies are trying not to be dumb pipes. And increasingly that's what they are becoming. Before Droid, on Verizon if you wanted a feature you had to pay more per month. The Wireless companies at first were happy about the smart phones because everyone had to buy a dataplan. Great, more revenue per customer. And that is the measure in the industry: how much can we suck from our customers.
Well Apple came along and launched their app store for the iPhone. And how much does ATT see from the app store? $0.
I've often wondered when the Carriers would hijack Android and do what they've done to other phones in the past and implement a "on our network, you use our Appstore."
The carriers see Apple earning hundreds of millions and now want their share of the pie.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Seriously, the PC market seemed to do just fine for decades without an official "app store". Why can't I just download an app from any vendor's site without having to go through some gatekeeper (who keeps 30% of the revenue). I'm a huge IPhone fan, but has Apple brainwashed us so much that we need an official app store that we forgot that it's not really necessary in the first place?
changed the mobile industry singlehandedly. While the transition of power is not ultimate, consumers in the mobile marketplace now have a new found power over the purveyors of the wireless service. AT&T, Verizon, et al, are now in reactionary mode. That is good for their customers.
In different words, Apple is following the same trajectory as previous mobile platforms: start off with a single screen size and a whole bunch of simple assumptions, and then try to patch things up as additional demands become apparent.
If you work with the platform, you realize this is not true - but it was only really apparent with release of the iPad.
Yes they started off with a single screen size, but not with the bunch of simple assumptions - from the outset for example all the tools totally supported defining resizing behaviors for any GUI element in Interface Builder, the GUI development tool. The Image API lets you define stretchable image types where only endcaps (on any of the four sides) remains fixed, while the middle simply repeats which lets you use the same nice graphics on elements that can take on different sizes. That did exist because of OS X, but there were other OS X elements the tool did not have to support - yet that was included.
But of course, as graphic designers are wont to do, many app developers did develop a lot of stuff targeted at pretty specific sizes (just like the web, take a look sometime at how many sites really support resized windows instead of having a design constrained to a particular width).
So how to solve that problem with devices that have different resolutions while still bringing new devices to market? I think the way Apple decided to address that, was by fixing categories to specific pixel sizes. So mobile devices the size of the iPhone get 320x480, but devices the size of the iPad get 1024x768.
Now where that gets interesting is that they don't just fix pixel sizes for categories, but within the categories they define UI elements that you can only use when you have the larger amount of space available. That is how they work around the issue, instead of letting developers flounder in a larger sea of pixels they give them some guidelines as to how they can use many of the elements they are used to while showing them ways to make better use of the larger space.
I would say that is in fact a different trajectory than other mobile (or even desktop) platforms have developed, where you have the same GUI libraries for devices of any pixel size. That to me shows at least some thoughtfulness as to direction and what it means to have more pixels.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sounds like we need some sort of cross platform language (e.g. Java), that has a common platform for mobile devices (e.g. J2ME). That allows for applications to run on different handsets via some sort of profile (e.g. MIDP, CLDC).
What are we waiting for...oh yes mobile makers to get there fingers out of their asses and start helping the consumer (e.g. through no vendor lock in).
I'd love to feel safe and warm knowing that any apps I've bought for my iPhone could be used on the new Samsung, or latest HTC device. As it stands I'm not able to swap hardware as easily as my investment in those apps is then lost...and this is what Apple wants (so do the others). Mobile makers don't want to compete on hardware specs alone, as that takes more time/money to develop than the software (hence a bigger potential loss if a rival comes out with better hardware that everyone uses 2 days after their release).
but they were fully aware that it wasn't mature enough for small screen devices
How exactly are the existing tools "not mature"? Remember these inherit not just from behaviors that were around since OS X 10.1, but even to some extent from NeXT before that!
At this point graceful resizing behaviors are actually pretty mature I would say, compared with a number of other GUI frameworks I have seen on a lot of other platforms.
So, parts of their software support arbitrary sizes
Default sizes, I don't know of any that are specifically fixed in size... Even some that seem like they are, like a navigation bar, you do not use as though they are a fixed size (you set left and right buttons and a title).
It always seemed to be Apple though pretty carefully about UI elements at different sizes, even if they have initial states set to specific sizes I can't think of any that do not work when resized.
Aren't you getting dizzy with all your Apple spin?
Cheap shot and ill-deserved I would say given the deliberation I have given the topic along with lending expertise to the discussion.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How does this proposed alliance claim to be able to get the same benefits?
They probably just expect to just do a shitty BREW app market (such as the Verizon Get It Now/VCAST store) and think that users won't laugh in their faces and go back to using native apps written by people who know what they're doing.
I welcome this initiative, but only because it will be a giant waste of money and effort for the cellcos, and anything that hurts them makes me smile spitefully.
Organisations with a history of locking down their phones and leveraging that monopoly to forcefeed substandard applications down the throats of consumers who have little alternatives, now coming together to create a new monopoly. Oh, the ways in which this will never work:
- Handset fragmentation, without a common runtime, it's doomed. Even with a common runtime, Android is already having trouble.
- Bureaucratic nightmare or toxic dumping ground. There is a fine line between creating too process centric an environment (Apple) and too open an environment (possibly Google) in an app store. I'll place money that these guys will go for the former. I've read their specifications before.
- Hideously inoperable toolsets. Without decent SDKs any effort is doomed and none of these organisations have any credible history of producing a half decent toolchain
- Competing standards already with JIL and Bondi. Committee first design (tm) is always broken.
- J2ME is such a great example of how the mobile operators can take a good idea and turn it into something that you can just about write a suduko game with.
An Apple representative have openly admitted that their App store is not a cashcow. According to him, they break even but not much more. (Compared to Apple's other incomes I guess) The app store is useful because it adds value to the IPhones, which Apple then sell more of. It's the sale of phone itself which is the main income.
With this business-strategy in mind, we need to ask why phone companies such as AT&T and Telenor moves in. Why do they support a scheme which is most successfull as a way to sell more phones? Remember, these companies do not produce phones themselves. Is it because they'r uncomfortable with the power that Apple and Google now wield in the phone market and wish to support "nicer" businesspartners like Ericsson and Nokia?
Or are we seeing a hint that the network providers have come up with a new business plan, to compete against Apple and Google? What do they have up their sleeves?
Do you have evidence that people use apps on the Iphone more than other platforms, and that this is due to Apple?
There have been many blogs from various companies selling stuff on both iPhone and Android, showing that you earn more money on the iPhone application - an order of magnitude more when there is not an order of magnitude difference in devices. Look for Pinch Media reports as well as individual sales blogs.
(I'm not sure the paying for it matters - sure, it's great for Apple, but it's not a good point for us if you have to pay for things that on other platforms you download for free.)
As a consumer it very much matters. Paying for something means there are no, or fewer, ads which I greatly prefer (both from application performance and network throughput). If people are not buying apps for a platform then most apps will migrate to be ad supported.
Yes there will always be some purely free apps but I prefer more complex and interesting applications that really mostly come about from paid effort. I am pleased to reward a good application with financial support - that's why I paid for a lot of shareware too, even though that model does not work very well in the P.C. world (by that I mean any desktop, not just Windows).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley