Credits: Damith C. Rajapakse
Brilliant post from Richard Wong. This was one of the few things I’ve been trying to figure out when I decided to work on a project on mobile apps. There is no standardization – no write on .Net and watch it run on 95% of the world’s computers; hell, even within Nokia handsets, some run on Symbian and some don’t even have an OS. What’s a man got to do to get his app possibly running on all handsets! Nopes, not going to happen. Forget the OS. Even the standards aren’t clear on what may dominate in the future.
Apart from this, I would assume even the purpose and the target consumers would matter. This is kind of obvious. You wouldn’t develop an iPhone app for a farmer in India. Nopes.
Wong hammers out these points for mobile entrepreneurs:
Don’t wait for the Magic Bullet
Bound The Problem & Get Down the User Learning Curve.
Geography matters
Get a guide
I can see why mobile operators are wary about stepping into the app space. Fragmentation will kill any hopes of generating billions of dollars like your voice and SMS services did. Fragmentation means not just standards and platforms but also the long tail of mobile applications and products. I guess this means we have to keep coming back to the same point: The platform with the most attractive services/ applications/ products wins. More importantly, what’s going to be interesting is the shift in balance of the who-has-whose-balls-in-their-hand phenomena. Till now, mobile service providers could dictate anything to the content providers since most of the services were network dependent. Now, if you don’t like the terms and conditions of Idea, well, just create a version on your website that can be directly downloaded onto the handset through the PC. (In a wierd reverse-Facebook like thing, none of the mobile operators have the monopoly of Facebook in social networking to demand much from the content provider. Now the platform has to pander to the content provider) This just gets more and more interesting
Interesting reading: Fragmentation of Mobile Applications
