“Is Apple’s dominance of Mobile Development on the Wane?”

It appears to be an old editorial trick, the classic alarmist headline, because the article itself goes on to answer in the negative:

Apple is the logical choice for mobile development today

Where is market share going? The best bet is still targeting the Apple iPhone

This, providing further evidence for my calling BS on “Android Dominance” post last month.

I completely agree with author, Todd Warren, when he says “there are so many things wrong with developing on iPhone.”  From a purely technical standpoint, developing for Android (or perhaps even, cough, Windows Phone) is a much more pleasant experience. However, from a business standpoint, the cold hard fact is: one can completely ignore Android, Samsung, and Windows Phone without consequence. Again, quoting the Forbes story:

As the success of Instagram shows, the iPhone market is big enough to bootstrap an application to millions of users.

I would take this a step further and say that not only is Apple iOS the logical choice for “mobile development” but that iOS is the choice for all future development, other than niche enterprise apps. In other words, the whole term “mobile development” as an exception is itself an archaic model. Non-mobile is now the exception.

The biggest problem is your battery.  Once you run Skype, it will keep running, and sucking up your battery.  Instead of 5-6 hours of usage on my 3G S, with Skype in the background, I was getting more like 2-3 hours.  As Stuart notes, the only way to stop it is manually from the iOS 4 multitasking (double-click) feature.

Skype should have a way to turn on/off multitasking from within the app itself. And as Stuart notes, when it is running in the background, you get barraged with notifications for everything and you have no controls over those notifications, short of quitting the Skype app from the multitasking bar.

The short of it is, if you start the Skype app, you probably want to double-click to kill it so it doesn’t kill your iPhone’s battery.

First, I’ve heard a lot of people say recently, statements along the lines of “2GB is more data than I’ll ever use.” There was a time when one megabyte (MB, not GB) was a lot of memory, a HUGE amount. There was a time when a 1.5Mbps T1 line was enough for an entire city. And it wasn’t that long ago. Things change.

And bandwidth doesn’t change in a steady, linear way – bandwidth needs tend to change in a dramatic stair-step way, when new ideas get popular. One example was the browser, circa 1991. The iPhone itself is a perfect example of this. Within a matter of weeks of the first iPhone’s release, AT&T suddenly found that people were using about 15 times more data. And they’ve been struggling to catch up ever since.

The iPad may have been the last straw for AT&T. Shortly after the 3G iPad hit the street, AT&T rescinded their promise from a few months prior to provide unlimited 3G access for $30 a month.

Now, on the one hand, there are few services where we pay on an unlimited, all-you-can-eat model, so perhaps, one could argue this is inevitable. On the other hand, an affordable unlimited data plan played a significant role in the success of iPhone and the resulting watershed change in what people expect and how people use their mobile devices. The metered plans AT&T is offering are not completely ridiculous in terms of price, say compared to the rates mobile phone carriers were charging for data prior to iPhone, but the metering alone, at any price, still has a major impact on users… and on the ecosystem.

With an unlimited plan, nobody looks at the bill. Nobody checks usage. Nobody thinks twice before clicking ‘Go’. For AT&T, that may be exactly the opposite of what they want (or think they want) – but for the industry and the ecosystem at large, it’s a good thing – a very good thing.  In the end, as part of that ecosystem, it’s good for AT&T too.  Come on. Where would AT&T be without the iPhone?  And beyond just the iPhone, AT&T is benefiting from the entire wave it has spawned, including Android and every other so-called iPhone-killer now available, and all those to follow.

The average monthly charge for all these “annoying” customers using these new phones is way higher than before, when people just had a voice plan and minimum texting. By moving to these metered rates, AT&T is potentially slowing the kinds of innovations that gave us the web, and the iPhone – innovations that AT&T themselves has benefited immensely from, to the tune of billions of dollars.

Beyond the affect on end-users, an even bigger factor is the effect on developers. As important as any technical aspect of iPhone’s success was a business factor – the thing that caused a major change in the landscape was universal unlimited data being bundled with the phone. Before iPhone (and still true in many cases with other carriers/phones), developers were dealing with an unknown when it came to what data plan a given customer might have, or even if a data plan was available to them at all. This severely stifled the ecosystem. With iPhone, developers knew every single customer had an unlimited data plan – and the result is hundreds of thousands of apps and millions of customized iPhone-specific web sites.

So, while many people suggest that AT&T is serving itself well by reverting to metered data plans, in the big picture, AT&T is hurting themselves as much as anyone. When people say things like “2GB is more data than I’ll ever use” this is unconsciously framed within a context of the apps that exist today. It precludes the “next new thing” and assumes a static picture of future cell phone use. Developers have to think twice about building apps that could push users over that limit, meaning such apps won’t be introduced, and we all get stuck in a 2010 world.

Thanks AT&T, for shooting yourself in the foot, and hitting us on the ricochet.

Yeah.  You know why? Because the iPhone provides a user experience that doesn’t make it almost impossible to use the Internet in any useful way, unlike AT&Ts other “smartphone” products. AT&T counted on iPhone users having a data usage profile similar to users of these other devices with their garbage user interfaces – no wonder nobody uses any data network on those things.

With the iPhone, even non-tech gurus can easily find and use web content, email, Twitter, and other data services. And so they use it, and use it. John Donovan, the chief technology officer of AT&T told the New York Times: “Overnight we’re seeing a radical shift in how people are using their phones. There’s just no parallel for the demand.”

iPhone users are already angry at AT&T for charging so much and giving so little. AT&T whines about spending billions on data network upgrades, but let’s face it: The iPhone has been a absolute blessing for AT&T:

The average iPhone owner pays AT&T $2,000 during his two-year contract — roughly twice the amount of the average mobile phone customer.

Without the iPhone, what would they be selling? Now AT&T wants to throttle back iPhone users even more. I think that would drive a mass exodus and put tremendous pressure on Apple to open up the device to other carriers.

Nokia is playing a hardware one-upsmanship game, while Apple has swooped in on the flank and utterly redefined the handset landscape.

And the really bad news for Nokia is that even if they are able to realize they are playing the wrong game, they are in no position to be any good at the new game that Apple has created. Apple knows how to build good-enough hardware.  More importantly, they know how to market it and they have their own distribution – all things out of Nokia’s reach. And the nail in the coffin? The App Store. Not only do they not have one, but Nokia doesn’t own enough of the parts to create one, nor do they have the expertise for operating one.

Nokia’s numbers will continue to slide as the DIY niche continues to narrow. I’m not smart enough to know how to get them out of this situation, but I can make one suggestion: Make your platform the easiest to build for. Get rid of “Symbian Signed” and let a third-party app marketplace thrive. Don’t make it easier to get certs – get rid of certs entirely! This is one place Nokia can immediately leapfrog Apple – not follow, but lead.  Get rid of approval and let anybody write code and let the market, the community, rate the apps, and let end-users decide which ones they want to install based those community ratings.

No calls unless you can get Wifi.

In general, incoming calls are impractical, even if you’re on wifi, since the Skype app has to be the one and only active app in order to receive calls.  If you’re doing something else on the phone, like browsing or checking email (or twitter), you cannot receive calls.

In test calls, I found the app unreliable even when all the conditions are met.  Trying to call the iPhone Skype from a PC, the calling side just continued to ring, even after I answered the call on the iPhone.  The Skype for iPhone app then seemed “frozen” where I couldn’t end the call or do anything except hit the big button.

When calls did connect (requires the iPhone to be connected via Wi-fi), the call quality was fine.

Not being able to make Skype calls except when connected to wi-fi is a pretty big limitation for me. Ironically, when a friend had to call their wife on Skype in Costa Rica recently, I had to let them use PhoneGnome and OpenSky on my iPhone to do so, because that was the only combination that worked on iPhone without wifi.

Spykee wifi robot interface for iPhone and iPod Touch

Basically you run the “controller” software on your LAN (the same LAN as the Spykee robot) and then use your iPhone to control and interact with your Spykee robot from anywhere.

The “controller” software is available as open-source and can be used on Mac OS X, Windows XP/Vista, or Linux/UNIX systems. As far as I know, this is the first release of an open-source implementation of the (binary) Spykee protocol. This software is provided in “C” under the BSD license, so it could be used as a basis for other home-grown Spykee applications, including motion detection, stealthy audio snooping etc.

iSpykee currently supports moving the robot, by touching areas of the video image: left, right, forward, and back; changing the robot motor speed (“Turbo mode”); turning the headlight on and off; taking a snapshot of what Spykee is seeing; turning “Video surveillance” (motion detector) mode on and off. It also supports a “low bandwidth” mode that can be useful when using iSpykee from a slow network connection (such as Edge).

Please check it out and join the iSpykee Google Group.

Updated to note that the “controller” software now works on Windows too.

As for the 5800 Xpress, a friend of mine recently brought one to the U.S. and after I played around with it for an hour, my response was meh! The touch was OK, just like it’s OK on any other device, but it’s not as responsive as the iPhone. So no, it’s not an iPhone killer, not by any means.

The N97 however, seems, like a worthy competitor… it will be sold in the U.S., where it’s going to cost $650; it will go on sale in June 2009…

I agree with these comments, but I would add that none of these other mobile players, whether carriers or phone manufacturers, seem to understand what battle they are fighting. They seem to think it’s about touch screens and hardware. Even Om emphasizes the touch screen issue:

The very fact that Nokia is only now getting out touchscreen phones shows that as a company it is stuck in bureaucratic quicksand, with a culture of consensus that makes it difficult to respond to new challenges. Nokia — and I have been following them for a while — has become one of those companies that, much like Microsoft, is good with announcements, not so great with the follow-up.

Stuck in a “bureaucratic quicksand” perhaps, but it’s really more than that. Nokia is selling just another piece of hardware. At one time, that mattered, because that’s how the industry worked. Apple changed all that and nobody has really grasped the magnitude of it yet. Apple changed everything about the mobile landscape. It may seem the same, but it’s not. It seems few people really appreciate what happened. That’s good for Apple – bad for the all their competitors.  As long as Apple’s would-be competitors continue to respond in 20th century ways to the new 21st century mobile phone landscape, Apple will continue to run roughshod over the industry.

Nokia is offering a Do-it-yourself solution, where users have to bring their own carrier, service plan and applications. That’s never going to be an “iPhone killer” because it’s not the same market – it’s not the same battle at all.

The problems for Nokia and any would-be “iPhone killer” don’t end with simply realizing the situation they’re in. Once they realize it, they will also realize they can’t compete on the same playing field. Apple owns the hardware, the distribution, and the service plan. (I know people get an AT&T plan with iPhone, but it might as well not be.  It is an iPhone plan.)  Nokia can’t do this. They don’t have distribution or control over the service plans. The carriers can’t do this. They don’t have Apple’s expertise at controlling the hardware. And most importantly, none of them have the App Store.

It’s not about the hardware.  If it were, Apple would already be in trouble. Compared to many other mobile phones, including many of those from Nokia, the iPhone is a piece of junk, hardware-wise. Apple isn’t winning because their phones are better. Apple is winning because the experience is better. People can actually use the iPhone. Ordinary non-technical people are doing things they have never done before on a mobile phone – things they would never do on a Nokia or other DIY solution.

Nokia may do fine in the DIY niche they’re in – but they will never have anything approaching an “iPhone killer” unless they make a bunch of acquisitions and change who there are.

This app only implements a sub-set of the full PC and Mac consoles.  I basically wanted to get some minimal functionality working before going too crazy with the UI and more esoteric features.  Here’s what it will do:

(1) Move the robot, using the left, right, forward, and back buttons.  Each press of the button moves a fixed amount.

(2) Turn the camera LED light on and off.

(3) Tell Spykee to take a snapshot.

(4) Turn ‘Video surveillance’ mode on and off.

Most importantly, the app shows you on the iPhone what the Spykee is seeing. It does not stream video in this version. It updates the “viewport” image periodically when the scene changes (or on demand with the ‘Update’ button). This keeps bandwidth usage down and still gives you a view of what the robot is seeing — and it even works on slow Edge connections.

It’s got another feature to help when controlling Spykee from a slow iPhone connection, where using the ‘Resolution’ button, you can flip between a lower resolution (but much less data) image and the normal full resolution Spykee view. This, and other features of the app, are demonstrated in the video below.

I made a video to show that, while this is still a hack, and is not ready to distribute by any means, it does actually work in real life, with a live robot. If I just provided the above screenshot, there’s no way to tell if it’s just a mock-up.

The video shows some of the basic functions as well as limitations. Even with those limitations, it is pretty cool (if I do say so myself), to be able to sign in and view what Spykee is seeing from anywhere, with just the iPhone without lugging around a PC or Mac, and even on a slow Edge connection.

UPDATE: Finally released. See: http://mrblog.org/2009/03/15/ispykee-open-source-spykee-for-iphone/

My guess is that’s more mobile phone application installations than all mobile phones combined, certainly for the same 60-day period, and perhaps for the life of the mobile phone industry.

What do you think? Does anybody have numbers?