Cell Phone Software: The Billion-Dollar Sand Trap | Hacker News Reader

Cell Phone Software: The Billion-Dollar Sand Trap

alexkrupp.typepad.com

19 pointsAlex391720 comments

I have a feeling this guy doesnt know what he's talking about. I see what he's trying to say, but he probably shouldn't talk about something he's not involved in or is familiar with.

Take point #3 for example. Has he not heard of OTA installation? That is the way things are done nowadays, not transfer over the USB cable.

Basically all of his points are BS with the exception of #1. Compatibility differences really are the problem with cell phone development. But this really just makes the barriers for entry higher. Cool things are still possible. Also, I'm not seeing THAT many cell phone startups right now.. At least not as many as I would expect.

So maybe the article doesn't enlighten those of you with extensive knowledge of the technology/market, but it did a great job of answering my basic questions.

I can think of about a million cool cell-phone apps, none of which exist yet. Conversely, there are about 10x as many web apps as I would ever need. There must be reasons why this is so...if it's not the ones listed here, what are they?

Maybe I should have posted a disclaimer about the intended audience.

1) This was written from a social perspective, not an engineering perspective. If you are looking at it from the point of view of the engineer, a lot of these wouldn't make sense or would seem trivial.

2) This was written for two kids in a garage, not huge corporations. Certainly if you throw enough resources into mobile you can create some cool stuff, but for two college kids to try it would be like launching a home-by-christmas offensive of Russia.

I should have noticed this was written by the person posting it here :( Wasn't trying to bash your blog, you bring up good points for developers new to cell phones to consider.

Well I think you are right too, in the sense that many of the points I mention probably don't overlap much with the challenges that corporate engineers in the industry face on a day-to-day basis. That being said, I think they are still important when considering things from the two guys in a garage perspective.

#1 is a bit off. As a result of the huge variety of handsets available the mobile industry has very strict adherence to standards. JavaME is available on most handsets providing a consistent platform for use accross hundreds of devices. WAP has been an established mobile web standard since the late 90s and is consistently supported. There are dozens of different mobile browsers and they all work. Theres a lot less cross browser compatability trouble than with desktops even with more browsers!

There are two main problems with mobile currently: device UI and carriers. Here in the EU at least carriers are openning up and encouraging users to try data services. Many now offer monthly flat rate data packages, such as Three who bundle skype, slingbox, etc with the package. T-Mobile even has a "well never charge you more than Â£1 a day for your data access" for pay as you go users. The operators now understand that they can make money from being mobile payment providers, identity solutions, ad brokers, etc instead of just charging huge ammounts for data.

So things are looking up. It may be 5-10 years before mobile web and apps are as mature as the desktop is now but there is so much potential thats it shouldnt be dissmissed so quickly.

I have worked in J2ME games development for two years and I can say that #1 is not off at all. There is no way around testing your application on all possible phones, because they all come with the weirdest bugs. For an example of what to expect: on some phones, PNG images show up broken if they are structured in a certain way (ie pixel dimensions not an even number or dimensions of image exceed screen size). Some method calls just crash the phone. Persistence might take forever or not work at all. Starting the application might take forever - on some phones it is slow if you load lots of small files, on other phones it is slow if you load fewer big files.

And it IS a pain to adapt to all possible screen sizes - granted, it might be a problem of designing the application, but as I was working on games, the design was often based on fixed size images. Especially as font support is crap with J2ME. Maybe flash for mobiles does a better job, haven't tried it.

Another thing that used to suck with J2ME: there is no standard for text entry, so it is difficult to integrate text entry nicely into your application. The only standard way is to switch to a blank screen that supports your phones text entry method, so you can't integrate it into your design.

Another problem, which I currently face: even if you know what phones you support, how can your customer know? Phones are usually not labeled with their technical name, so if you say "Nokia 6230i supported", it might mean nothing to your customer.

I wouldn't say it is impossible to make money with mobile applications, though. It seems also the price for mobile networking is falling.

Edit: the mobile games company I was working for was and is very successful and also in the meantime was bought by a big international entertainment company (think the Coca Cola of Entertainment). When I was there it was a 7 people company, so I think it qualifies as a successful startup (I think now they have 50 employees).

You definitely speak the truth. I think where the issues really show is when you try using the optional APIs, such as MMAPI. There is no requirement for specific codec support for example, which is a nightmare when trying to develop media applications in J2ME. You literally have to test on all devices or go through a beta program with a bunch of users with different phones and simply see if it breaks or not. For a small startup like us, its probably the only feasible way.

As far as UI differences, there are some good tools to help with that. You might want to check out J2ME Polish. On devices that will support it, you can get much more consistent and predictable results with how things will look on screen across platforms. I'm really impressed. Be aware though that if you dont plan on opening up your source code you'll have to pay a $1000+ license fee.

For these incompatibility reasons I'm actually drawn more to Windows Mobile.. I hate just about everything related to MSFT, but at least when you develop for Windows Mobile via VS2005 you get predictable results. What you see is what you are going to get and that is very valuable to a developer.

I find myself thinking more about J2ME applications lately, but for a while I was also expecting that eventually PDAs would dominate the market. So same as you, I was more drawn to Windows Mobile, although I don't have any experience with it. Another option would be to go "web based", if prices for networking continue to fall (in Germany I think you can get a Flatrate for 25 now - still too much for, say, an occasional gamer, but perhaps feasible for serious applications).

As for APIs, of course over time working with the devices one also builds a set of abstractions, so that it gets easier and easier to support multiple phones for future developments.

Plus handests have different proprietary apis for the more advanced stuff in j2me. Certainly as soon as you start trying to do anything 'interesting' it becomes a nightmare and there is a lot of space to improve. Mobile widgets might prove to be a good solution.

I forgot another problem: uncertainty about monetization. Theres no proven way to make money on mobile yet. Do you go ad supported? Sell to operators, device makers or users? Charge micropayments or subscriptions? It's hard to pitch a mobile startup when you dont know how you're going to make money from it!

Here in germany several companies are making good money with mobile phones. Usually the payment is all through "premium SMS", which can cost up to 5. So you can sell an application for 5 by having the user send an SMS to a certain number (you can also make it a monthly charge of 5, if you are lucky). Not sure how it works in the US. A huge share of the 5 goes to the operator, I think at least 40%, but it still works.

I think there is room for Ad Support for mobile devices - is anybody even doing it yet? One could start a company focussing on that - making interesting applications available for "free" might also give the whole business a boost.

At the moment it has a very bad reputation where I live because mostly the industry was ripping of kids. I don't think there even is a portal to check for serious applications. The mobile games portals have some serious applications at times, but I don't think the target audience is likely to stumble upon them there.

it has a very bad reputation where I live because mostly the industry was ripping of kids

Same here in the UK. There are a lot of companies tricking kids into premium subscription services for ringtones, etc.

Perhaps there is an oppertunity for a mobile marketplace/portal for applications? I think there are plenty of these for games, but are there any for apps? If the portal handled distribution, easy installation, etc it could work.

I'd like to think there is. How did the Palm Pilot homepage fare, anyway, they used to sell serious applications for Palm Pilots?

At least in Germany the established players seem to have a firm believe that the only ways to make serious money are through excessive TV advertising and abo schemes, or to be on the WAP pages of the actual carriers. There must be a huge untapped market out there, though - I don't know anybody who ever surfed their carriers WAP pages.

I am currently setting up a dedicated homepage for my mobile phone application, hoping to tap some other channels. I guess I will report back to YC news in a few weeks about it's success or failure.

Reason #12 not to go into mobile wireless: Not even the people writing about it have any idea what they're talking about. :-)

Shouldn't it be possible to somehow educate the users as to what phones to buy if they are interested in mobile applications? Probably atm it is a catch-22 as there are few useful applications so people don't worry too much about their phones capabilities.

Most adverts about phones don't even mention Java capability, it tends to take some detective work to discover a phones capabilities for development. Whereas having developed for mobile phones, there are some models I would definitely commend against.

People dont see mobile as something to run apps on. They see them as fashion accessories. They want a pretty handset that comes for free with their contract. This is why many have a RAZR despite it having one of the worst mobile UIs I have encountered and very poor support for apps. Heck, even I bought bought one for the way it looked despite being a developer who should have known better!

Perhaps if you could market a 'myspace' phone or a youtube handset it might work? A phone with tight integration between the device UI and popular web apps. This looks like more of a marketing problem than a technical one.

It's just a matter of time before all phones have real browsers and plugins, they already have the bandwidth. That's when it will become interesting to me. I'm lazy.

In my admittedly old fashioned view, the killer app for phones is talk, and the competition is too entrenched :).

Talk is great but I know many here in the UK who don't use the phone for talk, just SMS. I used to be one of them! As a teenager on a PAYG phone voice seemed too pricey. The per message charging for SMS was preferred than the per minute for voice. You knew exactly what a text was going to cost as opposed to a phone call that could drag on. Usually we would spend more on texting back and forth than the phone call would have cost but we still did it because of the consistency.

There are plenty of places to innovate even with voice. Theres no mobile white pages (those great big hulking phone books that contain all of the phone numbers of people living nearby) for example. Voicemail and other forms of asyncronus voice are ripe for improvement. Possibly even a 'voice twitter' that would let you record 60 second snippets of audio and broadcast them over website, skype, MMS etc. Micro-podcasting as it were!

Like you, I'm sure voice phone calls will remain the predominant use for a phone but that doesnt stop us innovating with mobile!

Seems to me that Cell Phones are in the position of home computers before the PC. Each manufacturer having differing standards and specs. I wonder if this is somewhere the Java really will be WORM?

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