Mike Mace just posted an article on his blog. He claims that mobile application vendors are currently facing hard times, and tries to explore reasons for this hardship. I wrote this article a few weeks ago, and felt that it may make a good addon to the current discussion:
Yours truly recently participated in the vienniese Linuxwochen, which basically is an opensource gathering. In a talk about free software, the following statement was made:
3g phone software is no safe investition. If your mobile phone dies, you need to buy all the software once again!
To be honest, that SpaceWarrior licence I purchased for my Siemens MT50(it cost like 15$ from T-Mobile back then, and was – hmm) years ago is still laying around on it and hasn’t moved to my SX1-so there is truth in the statement.
Of course, ‘dumbphones’ are incompatible with one another-but moving software from a broken phone to a new one is nearly impossible with some machines. Compare this to David, a Tamoggemon Binary Clock for Palm OS customer-his licence just moved for the fifth(!!!) time, this time from his sold Palm Zire 72 to his Palm m500(I have permission to give these figures, I know David very well).
The ones harmed most by this fact are developers. Most dumbphone software is sub-10$, feature-poor and generally ‘bad’. The reason for this is the lack of future-customers aren’t willing to pay loads of cash for an application that dies along with their mobile phone.
Developers obviously can’t do much about the incompatibilities-but they could at least offer free ‘redownloading’(via an unique id assigned to customers, for example) in case of screen damage, etc. You will definitely see a small bit of abuse, but the general feeling of investion safety will create happier customers willing to pay more money/app!
What do you think?
Related posts:
Content, RSS
Twitter
[...] Back to the boys brings us as usual some very excellent tech related reflexion from regulars such as Daniel Taylor on “Multiple Architectures for Mobility“, Tom Soft on “Another Flash from J2ME Developer Perspective“, Anders Borg on “Java ME, still not Write One, Run Anywhere“, Tam Hanna on “Investition security in the 3G content business“, David Beers on “How wireless becomes free“. Dennis Bournique – finally got his family name, from Wap Review does a review of the mobile edition of Yes.com, a site that tells you what song’s playing on the radio. Hello? [...]
Good that you have participated in vienniese Linuxwochen, I won’t get chance before.
But I opposed to the statement because its just the start and I was thinking of 4G. “3g phone software is safe investigation” Provided its backup binds the importance.