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?
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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.