Digital Media Buzz > Tower of Babel: Developing Mobile Apps for Multiple Platforms

Tower of Babel: Developing Mobile Apps for Multiple Platforms

By Ned Smith

Software application developers had it easy in the lazy, hazy, crazy days of the 20^th century. Personal computing was pretty much a platform duopoly with Microsoft and Mac battling for market share and bragging rights. The meteoric rise of mobile computing, fueled by the smartphone eruption, wrote finis to all that. The mobile world today is awash in a sea of competing  platforms.

This poses a dilemma for developers. How do you know where to begin or what platform to focus on? How will the introduction of Apple’s iPad or the opening of the Kindle to outside developers affect the mobile marketplace?

The developers at Where, a mobile search and recommendation service, ran the calculus and decided to cast a vast mobile net.  This service is available on six major platforms — iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm, J2ME and WAP — as well as through nine operators and seven OEMs. That approach was driven by bottom-line considerations, according to David Chang, Where’s vice president of product. “It’s a fairly straightforward decision process based on P&L,” he says. “The first component is the overall market opportunity in terms of technology readiness - is the technology market-ready?- and consumer adoption - will consumers buy and use the devices and applications? The second component is the initial cost to develop and the incremental cost to maintain and support.”

And sometimes the decision is made for strategic reasons. “One of the main reasons we developed an application for multiple platforms is that you get a larger footprint of consumers,” Chang says. “It’s more useful when you have other people who use the application. Friends and family members may be on different platforms. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever meet a family where everyone across the board uses the same phone.”

But there are challenges in developing for multiple platforms, he says. You have to deal with different form factors and the different development languages require different development skill sets.  The devices themselves also have different capabilities. This gives rise to the development of one-off feature sets. “One of our more popular features on the iPhone is the 3-D maps where you can see what’s around you in 3-D,” Chang explains. “That capability doesn’t quite exist on all platforms, so that’s one feature that’s only on the iPhone for us.”

A market fragmented by competing platforms provides a litmus test for the stickiness of new features, says Chang. “You tend to learn things on one platform and figure out whether it’s a platform-specific innovation or whether it’s applicable to more than the consumer base that’s on that one platform.”

Fragmentation also favors larger developers with deeper skills resources. “If you’re a two-person development shop, you probably can’t take advantage of the fact that you can be on all these devices because it’s very distracting to develop to a totally different platform,” Chang says. “We have developers in-house for these platforms, so whenever there’s a fragmented opportunity, we feel we can take advantage of it because of our assets. We can hop on one of those fragmented opportunities right away.”

The fit between application and device is also a key consideration, says Chang. Because of that, he says, Where may be expanding and looking for a spot on the iPad and Kindle dance cards in the near future. “We did actually take a look at both,” he says. “The nature of our application is that it’s really meant for people on the go. We envision the Kindle and the iPad to be much more home devices or stationary devices where there won’t be a pressing need for finding something like the closest coffee shop. You probably already know where it is.”

How users interact with an application is another consideration. NBA Digital is a partnership between the NBA and Turner Sports. They jointly manage the NBA’s digital assets and are extending the league’s reach into the mobile marketplace with 33 paid and free applications across the Android, Blackberry and iPhone Platforms, including its signature, NBA Game Time.  “The key for us is to develop new products for our experiences,” says Michael Adamson, Turner’s vice president new sports products. “We began our mobile app development a year ago. We want to reach the most NBA fans possible. That necessitated a mobile strategy.”

NBA Digital took a look at who was engaging with NBA.com already on a mobile phone and paid close attention to the momentum of the iPhone in selecting the platforms to support. “Video was one of the major challenges in developing across platform,” says Adamson. “We developed with a screen dimension and user experience in mind. All the devices look incredibly similar. We have been very pleased with the results. It’s not intended to be NBA.com; it’s filling in the gaps.”  Given their druthers, says Adamson, fans want to see sports live, not on a small screen.” But life gets in the way.” That’s where NBA Digital comes in.

Adamson says this has been a learning process to find out what works in mobile. “We are trying to learn as much as we can during the 2009-2010 season,” he says.  “Here’s one surprise. The number of fans who engaged us on the Android platform has been much higher than we expected. They’ve become really avid and engaged.”

The fit between the application, device suitability and prior fan interaction with NBA.com lead NBA Digital to home in on developing for the Android, Blackberry and iPhone platforms.

You don’t have to have the deep pockets of the NBA and Turner Broadcasting or the deep skill-set bench of Where, however, to develop cross-platform mobile applications. There’s a way to port without pain.

Appceleartor made its bones by providing a platform that lets developers create native mobile application experiences for iPhone and Android devices using existing web skills like Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python, Ruby, and PHP.  Though the apps created are not true native apps, they’re well beyond good enough, according to Scott Schwarzhoff, Appcelerator’s vice president of marketing.”We’re at 99 percent of native speed,” he says.

Mobile, Schwarzhoff says, is not a mature marketplace. In making the decision about what platform to pick, he advises, a developer should ask,” What’s the market today versus where it will be when I get my app to market?” He needs to get a sense of the opportunity across the market.

Appcelerator, echoing Where’s thumbs-down on Amazon’s device,  is going to pass on making its platform work with the Kindle. “We don’t have plans to support Kindle,” Schwarzhoff says. “It’s a business decision. We go where the opportunity is. The Kindle is not designed from the get-go as an applications platform.”

Not so, though, with Apple’s iPad. “The iPad is not only a new platform,” he says. “It’s a new category.” In a recent survey of 23,000 developers conducted by Appceleator, 90 percent said they were interested in building an iPad application within the first year.

“The principles of the iPad have been proven by the iPhone,” says Schwarzhoff. “People say the iPad is just a big iPhone. Is there anything wrong with that?”