Mobile widgets - who is the audience?

My colleagues over at Vision Mobile have just posted a summary of their latest research paper on mobile widgets.

One question that isn't addressed in their posting is - who are using, or going to use mobile widgets?

Mobile operators and OEMs love the idea of widgets - as they get to bring some of the technology from the internet to their platforms - whether they are handset platforms, or network platforms.

What is less frequently asked are the two questions:

• Why do consumers want mobile widgets?
• Who will create and publish mobile widgets?

From a consumer's perspective a mobile widget is indistinguishable from a mobile application. So the same challenges that face consumers in understanding why they might want an application, how they download applications, manage them, find them once they are downloaded continue to exist.

From a publisher's perspective the mobile widget platforms further fragment the mobile market - there isn't a consistent set of technologies that run across devices from different OEMs or across different operators. If your consumer targets don't self select to be either a single operator customers (hint, unless your offering sells through an operator they don't) or a single OEM (enterprise markets and blackberry are a case, as are early adopters and iPhone) you still have to manage the problem of creating, distributing and maintaing your mobile offer through multiple portals, stores, platforms, and operators.

While widgets have promise - there is still a long way to go to become a compelling offering to either consumers or publishers - and without growth in compelling content from publishers, or growth in usage from consumers - mobile widgets are destined to become another "also ran" solution in mobile.

Comments

[Mark Doherty]

Wasn't Flash Cast a widget platform? Funny that it didn't get a mention with it's 25m subscribers..

[JP BAUDOUIN]

Matt,
I agree with "From a publisher's perspective the mobile widget platforms further fragment the mobile market" ... BUT from our mobile fragmented world of AE's ..publishing a simple widget based service (say information..)is quite easier: 1) no care of device capabilities as we know with strong mobile AE runtimes, 2) most Widget engine are unified languages: mainly XML/some Javascript ..easy to transform, easy to code that is to say, easy to built a cross-widget publishing platform.. No ?
From more that 20 engines listed so far,with accessible API, I'll try to build such cross-publish architecture, to see, and validate.

Regards

[Matt]

If you are developing in XML/Javascript - why not simply build a web page for the phone?

If the answer is that you get to take advantage of device specific features, then don't you lose the advantage of portability?

The idea of a cross-publish architecture is interesting - but seems to be solving the same "all the mobile platforms are different" problem that has existed in the browser world - and led to the creation of mobile browser "reformatting" technologies from people like Volantis and Crisp Wireless which place an infrastructure on top to abstract the platforms.

Ultimately these solutions don't add value - they merely increase the cost of addressing the fragmented mobile space - so long term I expect to see a trend to a small number of good, webkit based devices (given Webkit has support from Nokia/Google-Android/Apple) and the other devices being purchased by consumers who don't care about content - phones are just about voice.

[Cherlin]

Ry8RPE Good point. I hadn't thought about it quite that way. :)

[Brandy]

grTKYk Kudos to you! I hadn't thought of that!