In the race to build successful new mobile platforms and win the battle for leadership in mobile applications, executives at platform companies now have a new metric to measure:
Number of developers on their platform
The logic is simple - the more developers, the more applications, and the more hit applications for your platform. More applications used by more users, and the result - more money for every party, along with happier users.
The most recent entrant to the mobile platform party is LiMo who along with Vodafone 360's new M1 and H1 handsets from Samsung are beginning competition in the hotbed of smartphone competition that is western europe.
LiMo foundation is led by Morgan Gillis, who knows this space well as he used to be at Symbian. It's interesting to read his thoughts on the next phase of LiMo's development . In the competition for developers LiMo is taking a new route:
"choice" has become LiMo's new mantra--so much so that it plans to add one or two popular developer platforms to its core technology. Candidates include Java, Adobe ( ADBE -news - people ) and Brew, all of which claim sizable developer communities. "We aim to bring as many large groups of developers onto our platform as possible," says Gillis.
The goal here is simple - add a popular developer platform and you can then claim all those developers as yours.
Unfortunately life isn't so simple, and this strategy fragments the focus of platform companies. It also leads to confusion for developers "which language do I develop in?" and gets worse once there are different devices supporting different versions of a runtime (Java fragmentation anyone?)
LiMo have got the approach fundamentally wrong here. Their goal isn't to "attract developers" to their platform by adding 3rd party runtimes, but instead to
enable popular developer platforms to support all devices with updatable runtimes
Imagine this alternative approach:
LiMo enables developer platforms to make available and update over the air new platform runtimes and versions to all LiMo devices and guarantees binary compatibility for these platform runtimes in all future versions of the LiMo platform.
This is just exactly what Microsoft offers to platform companies with Windows on the desktop.
Now Adobe (Flash), Sun (Java), Qualcomm (BREW), Nokia (QT) any other new entrant can create, maintain and support a rich runtime that enables their developers to get the most out of their development platform by reaching the greatest number of devices.
This also allows LiMo to focus on the core areas that are essential to them - making sure that the underlying components in the LiMo platform are high performance, robust, reliable and updatable to address new technologies.
It seems at the moment the market leader in providing an updatable platform remains Apple with their closed OS X + iPhone system, with Google and Android being the closest second - unfortunately the variable availability of Flash for Android devices (on some, not on others) shows that even Google have some way to go here.
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