Viva La Blog

This is potentially some great news out of MWC 2010 in Barcelona: A whole gaggle of major mobile networks have formed an alliance to bring a consolidated marketplace for apps to their consumers, totalling over 3 billion subs. You can see the details here: Wholesale Applications Community.

It’s ambitious, it will be wracked with technical challenges, and it will no doubt take way longer to achieve than planned. But it has to be done. Mobile networks have watched over the last 12 months as their content revenues plunged – cannibalized by the app stores of the very handsets they are selling. The only way to combat this is to provide a rival offering that can go toe-to-toe on a global scale, and the key factor will be billing.

Billing, or inability to easily perform billing, has been a thorn in the side of developers and distributors for time immemorial (okay, 8 years or so). Apple have the strength of their iTunes platform, but the Wholesale Apps Community will have the huge advantage of direct mobile billing to billions of customers. The lure of that cannot be underestimated. And if the process by which developers will distribute their apps is made simple it will then cut out the middle-man aggregator and boost returns for the people who actually build the products. I dream of the day that I can put our multiplayer games in front of huge numbers of potental players, with on-bill micro transactions enabled across the board, and a 70%+ revenue share. Oh Happy Day!

I am cautiously optimistic that the Wholesale Apps Community will bring many millions more consumers into the world of purchasing mobile content and give developers another avenue for making a return on their hard work. I will be watching with great interest.

Hi World.

So, we’ve been a busy little team lately and the new website is starting to take shape for 2010. The mobile apps and games industry has changed an awful lot since we started out in 2003 and it makes sense to start discussing these changes and where things are going. Hence this blog.

What we’d like to do is to not hold back. We’d like to discuss what really is going on, who’s winning, who’s losing, what’s working and what really gets our blood boiling.

Okay…i’ll start:

Right now i’m loving Android. It’s the vibrant young prince waiting in the wings to knock off the doddering old King J2ME. It’s got style, it’s got panache, it’s fit and has the world at it’s feet. Unfortunately, just like a young prince, Android is also impatient, misguided and won’t listen to its sage advisors.

I greeted the release of the Android SDK with open arms and a cry of  “huzzah! an end to the woes of J2ME fragmentation”. Sixteen months and seven SDK versions later (count them… 1.0, 1.1, 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.01, 2.1) the no-fragmentation dream seems to be in tatters. What is Google doing?!? While iPhone rips it up, releasing just one new SDK about every 18 months, Google is driving developers nuts with the constant updates, API changes and class deprecations. Combined with a distinct lack of useful documentation, I sometimes wonder if Google is having a gag at our expense over at the ‘Plex.

Our current project ran into it’s first major frag-snag when implementing an email contacts function. On 1.6 and below you use one system to get all your contacts email addresses. On 2.0 they scratched that, and replaced it with an entirely new way. That’s right, they didn’t just deprecate the old method and advise you to upgrade your code for the future. They simply removed the old way completely. Bloody hell!

Next came the multiple screen sizes. When we had 240 x 320 and 320 x 480 we were going ok. Then the Droid appeared with 480 x 854 and I started worrying that this was getting out of hand. When the Nexus One debuted with 480 x 800 I wanted to punch the little green Android mascot hard in it’s stupid smiling head. Harsh, I know, but someone please think of the developers!!

Still, despite it all, I think Android will be huge and once Google feel they have ‘got it right’ they will slow down to smell the roses and let the developers get on with the business of making great apps that can work on millions of handsets *crosses fingers*.