The battle of the mobile platforms

I have been hearing a lot lately from various people, especially those who are starting now new ventures, but also established companies about their tendency to develop their apps to the new kids in the platform block (iPhone and Android) while abandoning older and more established platforms, especially J2ME.

The claim is that J2ME is too much of a hassle, first because of its porting problem, then because of the carrier related problems, and in the end the result on devices doesn't look too good anyway due to the platform limitations.

I agree that J2ME hasn't been very pleasant for developers in the past few years, and same goes for other platforms such as Brew, Symbian, Windows Mobile to some extent - each with its own problems (Flash Lite is somewhere in between it's relatively new and promising but didn't make as much noise as iPhone/Andorid). But things are changing and it would be a shame to drop these platforms just when they are maturing and go to new and shiny platforms that is still in its boot camp...

But let's go back a bit, and ask first the very important question: Who is your target audience? This marketing 101 question will lead to the next question: What devices does your market audience use? (or in other words: What are your target devices?)

I believe asking this question, while ignoring technology aspects for a second, is very important since it makes the distinction between which devices your target audience uses to which devices you would have liked them to use...

Yes, there are new shiny platforms like the iPhone and delayed but soon to be launched Android, and yes, you can do great things with those. Things you wouldn't have dreamed about doing in J2ME. But, your users are not necessarily using them. To be exact, whatever your target is, 0% use Android currently.... And as for the iPhone it is true that it has gained a very nice chunk of the smartphones market share in the US (27%), but its global marketshare when you take into account all phones (not just smartphones) is 0.14%...

Also actual handset market share data may surprise you sometimes. For example in the US you will find that the top phone is Motorola V3, which really doesn't have a strong J2ME virtual machine, and my guess is that its Brew version strength is similar... Other phones in the top places are not that strong either. Note that I am not talking necessarily about currently selling phones, but about handsets that are currently in the hands of the American people, and until iPhone/Android will crawl up to the top of the table it will take time.

The reality is that sometimes your target audience uses low-end devices. Take gaming for example. I believe that the true promise of mobile gaming is bringing games not just to those with the newest smartphones, or niche gaming devices, but rather get them to everyone - to those "dormant" gamers, that would love to kill 5 minutes on their way to school/work/senior citizens house... And experience has shown that you do not necessarily need a game with killer graphics/FX - in fact the most simple games such as trivia games (who wants to be a millionaire, wheel of fortune) and puzzles such as Tetris have been the best selling games, you don't have to take my word for it - check out Jamster's top mobile games list.

So my bet is that J2ME will stay a solid platform for gaming and even the first choice as it is today, even if the new platforms offer more stuff.

On the other hand, if you are developing business applications that require anyway devices with good internet connectivity, big screens and maybe even full qwerty keyboard and/or touch support, naturally your first choices will be smartphones platforms like those who've been around (Symbian, Windows Mobile) and also the newer iPhone and Android.

In any case, don't forget that all the childhood sicknesses that J2ME has been having in the past few years are still waiting to happen on iPhone/Android... It is true that iPhone is less problematic in the same way that Mac hardware and drivers was less problematic than what we used to call "IBM-compatibles" (now known as PCs...) - simply since in the PC world there were hundreds of hardware suppliers and in the Mac just one... However, Apple might also release several devices for different profiles - even now we already have 2 devices: iPhone and iPhone 3G. Now what about the rumored iPhone Nano (Some say it's a hoax), or the other iPhone flavors that will be launched in the future? (iPhone Air?...)

One of things the mobile market has proved is that people like to differ themselves with cool new gadgets... The iPhone definitely hit that spot, but you can't do it twice - people will be looking for the next cool thing, and I have no doubt Apple will know how to provide it, but once you issue different screen sizes and different capabilities, you break somewhat the promise of no porting problems (And don't forget the iPhone look alikes coming soon from all the major handset vendors, each of those have the potential to become a hit, but they won't have the same platforms at all..)

And the irony is that just now when people have given up on J2ME, it is finally getting stabilized... it is not there yet - but definitely going in the right direction. For example, many developers can tell you that porting to the new breed of devices is not that hard as it used to be. In fact MIDP 2.0/CLDC 1.1 devices actually sport reasonable if not good VMs that are less buggy and less quirky. This led to the one-JAR-fits-all approach, that could have never worked in the past, but surprisingly enough, it works now. It may not fit 100% of the devices, but it fits a very large proportion of the newer devices.

In addition, capabilities that in the past were non-existent in the Java world because of the sandbox approach are now available on most new devices: Starting with bluetooth, advanced networking (Not just HTTP), which were here for a long time now, going through addressbook and file system access, location based services, 3D graphics, vector graphics which are available on most new devices and till newer features like content handling (your java app can be registered as a handler for a content type, so you can write a video player that automatically launches when the user clicks on video file even outside of the java context).

And the best thing is that all those capabilities are better standartized than before. And also Sun is actually taking a proactive role both in the standartization and also in introducing new frameworks that makes things easier for developers such as their new UI toolkit, LWUIT.

To sum up - don't get me wrong, I believe that iPhone and Android are both great and promising platforms that open new possibilities for mobile developers, and we can already see its effects on the platforms market. There's nothing like a competitor "breathing on your neck" to get you finally going faster... But: Don't focus all your energy there. Pay attention to the platforms that are currently in the hands of your users, and that in spite of how things look like now, will probably stay there, at least enough to make you get used to them...

Mobile Advertising

Last Sunday I attended the IMA Mobile Advertising event. I wrote here before several times about the potential that mobile advertising has to open the mobile content market, and it's good to see that there was some progress in this area.

The event featured lectures and panels from all the "involved parties": Advertisers, advertising agencies, content companies, enablers and operators. It was interesting to see how the various parties see the issues from their perspective. I won't quote anyone here, since I am not sure who said what... but these are my general impressions (And you can take a look at the link above to see the participants list):

To get some proportions I'll start by saying that the actual advertisers (i.e. Cocacola) said that mobile advertising takes a few percents out of their budget (few=single digit, my guess closer to 0 than to 5...), and these are advanced advertisers that experiment with new media and create cool stuff online and mobile. So the market is still in its infancy. However, a few years back it didn't exist at all, and let's not forget how traditional advertisers treated the internet in the past...

As for the agencies, one of the trends we saw in recent years is the rise of online/mobile agencies, usually subsidiaries of the big agencies but sometimes independent. Most of the agencies in the panel said that this is turning around and that the new/old thing is working by concept rather than by media - i.e. unify all the activities of a certain brand - paper, tv, online, mobile under the same team, thus consolidating the online/mobile agencies back into the traditional ones. At first it may look like a bad sign for online/mobile - but i think it is actually a good sign - since the online/mobile activities are not considered an odd thing anymore.

As for content - the promise of sponsored content always seemed to me as the right thing for the mobile world. Instead of paying for games, videos etc. - users would be able to download those for free, with ads. However, it seems that there are several approaches here: One approach is that everything can be sponsored, while the other approach says that advertising applies to the mobile web (i.e. banners in wap pages) but premium content should and stay paid, since even premium content in the internet is paid (i.e. songs/videos from iTunes).

My take on this is that it all depends on what the end user gets, and that sooner or later the models we see on the web will become the standard for mobile as well. For example, if the user gets a whole song or a whole TV episode to his mobile, then the web model applies and he will pay. But if it's just a short funny video he gets, or a news-item video, this will probably be sponsored in the future, again - as it is on the web. As for games, there's an interesting question here since most games you would call "premium games" on mobile, would have been considered casual games on the web - ones you wouldn't even think of paying but rather play online and see some ads while you're out it....

Anyway, everyone agrees that advergames and adver-content (i.e. content which is the advertisement/brand itself) which are distributed free is a sustainable model, and often a good way to interact with consumers and raise brand awareness in a unique way (until it becomes mainstream...).

Technology enablers still play a major role in this market and it will be interesting to see who will rise up as the DoubleClick/AdSense of the market - in the meantime there's just a lot of competition and noise... I guess good solutions in this field need to address all of the above complexities and supply one framework that "eats all" (Easier said than done...)

And operators? Well, while everyone says they will end up being the pipeline and nothing more, they still have quite a grip on what is being done in this space. Some of them are quite afraid of ad-based content since when the user doesn't pay for the content - they don't see a piece of the action. Others are exploring this space carefully, and while you can see banners in their WAP portals, when it comes to sponsored content - there have been a few experiments, but nothing mainstream. Turkcell (who spoke at the event) did some nice projects in this field, but I'm not sure it's a good sign when advertisers approach operators directly.

Still advertisers can promote their adver-content off-deck and some did great in this way (at least in countries where operators don't block your app...)

Overall, the topic is very hot and "happening" and the event hit the right spots. We'll certainly address advertising in one of the next Mobile Monday Tel Aviv events as well, so stay tuned...