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Comment by robryan | Hacker News Reader

This is the way forward, a company that wants to develop native apps for mobile must already work with so many different systems. A new startup is going to focus on an iphone app, if they are successful or well capitalized from the start then they will look at android. The third choice in the market is shaping to be windows 7 phone.

Expecting companies to develop for then yet another platform, one which seems to be redefined often, is asking a lot and will result in getting only the really big players and lower rate developers trying to cash in on the under exploited platform.

In a way it's similar to Yahoo outsourcing their search to Bing, advertisers focused most of their attention on adwords and then also rolled some Bing campaigns, but only so much attention can then be given to the third player in the market for even less ROI for time spent due to the lower search volume.

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> This is the way forward, a company that wants to develop native apps for mobile must already work with so many different systems. A new startup is going to focus on an iphone app, if they are successful or well capitalized from the start then they will look at android. The third choice in the market is shaping to be windows 7 phone.

I agree with what you said here. But to take it a step further I'd say that the number one rule I've learned from doing mobile native apps the last few years is that ideally one should NOT be making mobile native apps. Make a web app, that just happens to look and interact decently on a mobile device. Saves developers a lot of pain and a lot of time otherwise invested in a more narrow platform set of skills.

For this to be truly a reality you would need mobile developers to expose more functionality to the web app. The web app could also become a common interface with lower level functionality, so say a camera on an android phone and an iphone could both expose a common js interface.

This is what Palm was trying to achieve with WebOS.

> But to take it a step further I'd say that the number one rule I've learned from doing mobile native apps the last few years is that ideally one should NOT be making mobile native apps. Make a web app, that just happens to look and interact decently on a mobile device.

Yeah, make a web page so I would need to start the browser first, then wait for the page to load. The GUI and the experience will be completely different than anything what I already have on the phone, not to mention that the GUI will be suboptimal. Transition between screens in the app will be dependent on network coverage - if I'm in the bus and it stops on some blind spot just when I clicked the button, I'll have to watch white screen (or an error message) until the bus moves. And for what? To "save developers a lot of pain". Sounds reasonable, I'm sure I'll give you my money.

If your goal is to provide for a nice developer experience, sure. Thing is that developers are paid to do non-pleasant things in order to maximize the end user experience. Most web apps are crap on the desktop already, but not enough to be worse than desktop apps (because of other advantages); but on a mobile, they're 10x worse and in almost no cases equally good let alone better than the native app.

What web apps do you know that work great on a phone? Maybe my experience is skewed, but the slickest web-based phone app is the mobile version of Reddit, and that thing still sucks when you actually use it.

Color me unconvinced - native dev isn't going anywhere just yet.

Not really, Nokia's Ovi Store is now third in downloaded apps per day. However, in many countries such as in China, Ovi Store is the most popular app store.

http://www.forum.nokia.com/Distribute/Ovi_Store_statistics.x...

This says nothing of what the sales are like in China which is notorious for not paying for software. In China currently these phones have a much larger share of the market because they are cheaper than iphones and android phones.

Eventually when the prices of the better smartphones fall you would expect a big shift away from nokia unless they can improve on their current offerings. I think we will have to wait some time to for windows 7 phone to pick up some market share before app store figures show whether it is a better bet than nokia in the American market.

Pretty much the only people making money on Ovi are game companies. Nothing wrong with that, except that gaming is different to other types of software.

Also, note these points:

  * There are 30,000 apps available
  * 400,000 new Forum Nokia developers were added in the last 12 months.

That really illustrates what a horrible platform Nokia has. 400K new developers were interested in it over the last 12 months, and yet there are only 30K apps in the whole store. Compare that to the adoption that the iOS and Android app stores have had.

The prior development tools for native Symbian have been horrid, combined with difficult signing process etc. However, the transition to Qt and Qt Quick -based apps makes it all very easy and convenient thus enabling the potential better. It's true that it isn't the most exciting platform right now, but it's certainly on the right path.

Yeah, but that's like saying that Lotus 123 was on the right path when they finally ported it to Windows.

With Qt/Qt Quick you get an environment that is sort of competitive with where iOS and Android were over a year ago. Meanwhile, iOS and Android have moved on and are accelerating development of their SDKs, and Nokia is falling further & further behind.

Anyway, say you build your app, thinking how great it will be with the huge reach of the Symbian platform. You ship, and discover that (a) people who have a Symbian phone and can afford to buy your apps are just waiting to upgrade to iOS or Android, and so won't invest any time in new apps on their Nokia phones and (b) Symbian is only growing in use in the developing world, where people are very unlikely to buy your app because the cost is a lot more significant.

So you give up, and go back to iOS and Android where the toolsets are nicer and there is more money to be made.

Hmm, in my opinion Qt/Qt Quick is certainly superior to Android in many respects today. And I do use both.

WP7 isn't shaping up to be anything. Nokia sold more N8's than all the WP7 manufacturers combined.

Secondly, there is room in the market for other players as indicated by Bada's success.

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