Mobile Operators Fight App Store Fragmentation 178
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."
Buying goldfish food (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
fighting the wrong fragmentation (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:they fight for control (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, they're headed away from that. T-Mobile will welcome any GSM phone capable of using their frequencies and even reward such a customer with a discount on service. Verizon has announced they'll design their 4G network to allow anybody who uses a certified radio chip. Sprint allows many "virtual" network operators to rent their network. So, AT&T is the last to this party, but they'll get there eventually.
Re:they fight for control (Score:2, Interesting)
Sprint outright owns Boost and Virgin Mobile, are there still 'many' virtual operators left on their network when you take that into account?
Re:Standards... anyone? Anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
That proprietary music player will never catch on. Yet all the younger people I meet have a iPod Touch or a standard iPod. I myself used to have a 40GB iPod, and now own an iPhone.
iTunes might seem evil on some platforms (and on Windows it's a bloated &*^%$%^& piece of *&^%$, but on a MAC (or Hackintosh), it's really nice.
Now, what they need to do is two little things.
Make the freaking player look like a standard USB drive to the computer. if it's DRM'd, fine, go with iTunes, but for other stuff, let it act as a USB key (like other MP3 players)
And allow an iPod to sync with other media players, like Media Center...
Like it or not, MCE is really nice and gets the job done, not like Snapstream who promised integration 3 years ago and ditched all their customers. (i've got two licenses here, sitting on my mail server, BTV and Beyond Media bought on a promise that Snapstream would merge the product in 5.x, along with their Firefly remote).
Why do we need an app store at all? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Not true, Apple's path shows planning (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Standards... anyone? Anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
without that you'd have maybe 5% of the activity you see now, most people don't buy apps.
On other platforms that is more or less true, but what Apple has succeeding in doing is creating an environment where people DO pay for apps. They may not pay a lot, but there is a culture of willing to spend some money to experiment.
I think in large part that is because from iTunes Apple had so much experience in making payment as easy as possible, and of course the fact that millions of people already had a CC on file with Apple. So there was zero barrier to entry for initial purchase, and once you get into the habit it's easy to justify a lot of small purchases.
I also think you give too much credit to Apple's marketing, and not enough to the functionality and UI it offered out of the gate - after all, initial Apple marketing was (and to this day primarily is) simply showing applications running on the device.
In fact I expect apple to be in for a world of pain as new configurations enter, because they and app devs didn't think about them as the platform was created.) and caveat emptor on the rest.
This is not the case at all.
Apple's UI builder has supported a pretty rich definition for auto-resizing behavior from the start - to some degree developers actually do have to make use of them, because some system actions (like the status bar dropping down to indicate a call is in progress or the keyboard popping up) can change available screen space.
While I do know many applications have tended to hard code things around the iPhone screen resolution, it is not that hard to adapt to the larger screen real estate the iPad offers and this transition will really get developers in the habit of properly supporting resizing from now on, without that much pain in the present.
Or just not allow an app to appear in search if the configuration isn't supported.
In the more general case of all different phone App Stores, I have to think that will be the case - for instance there is a Windows Mobile app store today. Yet none of that software will be able to run as-is on the newer Windows Phone 7 Series, so it seems like there is no-way any of that would appear in the revised app store. Perhaps app stores per-configuration eventually (I guess the same thing as what you are saying, or the same effect anyway).
The real problem here is that you have way too many players and they'll be working at cross purposes. There's a good reason to have app stores that are separate from the platform makers (just look at Apple's convoluted and broken approval process), but a conglomeration of carriers isn't the place to do it. Too many chiefs, not enough indians. I wouldn't be surprised to see someone like Valve or Stardock get into it though.
Although Android and WebOS let you download apps from anywhere, I do not think the next Windows7 mobile platform will let you do so. For one thing taht degree of control appeals to Microsoft but also they have been but by the security bug so many times they really like the idea of eliminating one source of potential issues for users (which totally fits in with the newer OS being far more consumer focused).
So that cuts Valve/Stardock right out of the loop. Thus the remaining approach is the varied cross-platform development platform development - Adobe is trying with Air and Flash (both to compile to iPhone binaries, Flash already does) and there are a lot of other cross-platform mobile frameworks that target iPhone and Android at least. Cross platform development tools like that have never really worked well in the past though and I continue to think they will suffer to some extent, especially when any significant effort is put into a native app that performs the same function. A native app has the potential to always be better than any app developed in a cross-platform framework, no matter what the system.
"not mature"? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why do we need an app store at all? (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, the PC market seemed to do just fine for decades without an official "app store".
Actually, the PC market has been mostly shitty, unless you happen to be Microsoft or Adobe, or one of the big enterprise software writers. For the most part, users didn't buy many applications that didn't come with the computer. And the majority of people who did use third-party applications pirated them.
Compared to the iPhone app store, the third-party PC software market is a failure. If PC software sales were even close to the per-user sales on the iPhone, the market would be much larger than what it is.
Re:Standards... anyone? Anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
developers will work around screen issues.
the real problem is that the operators want to 'own the customer' - so they all put in their own stupid rules, controls, regulations.
e.g. I have a windows mobile app, but if I want to release it with orange, I have to
-Sign up to their system.
-Pay for orange signing and testing (and go through the time-consuming process of doing it)
-Probably make a bunch of orange-specific changes
-Give them ~65% of the revenue
-Hope that individual country managers decide they would like to include my app on their country's store (this is in no way guaranteed)
-and probably go through the same pain every update
(exact details may have evolved, but you get the rough idea)
it is just too painful. There is no way I'll go through this process for a bunch of operators/portals in order to get access to each walled off niche of customers.
If the operators really are willing to back off and let a central catalog manage a single approval process, then they'll have a load more apps to offer users.
Of course to do this, they'll have to let go of the idea that they add value by controlling the application deck. They'll have to move another step closer to being a utility provider of comoditised bandwidth. That terrifies them.