The Fourth Wave
of Mobile Software
by Paul Dumais, Chief Technology Officer, Rove
A few months ago Apple released the iPhone SDK to software developers and in a few days we should see the launch of iPhone App Store. I believe this represents the fourth major wave of applications for mobile devices.
The first wave came with the launch of the Palm OS device. The Palm Pilot was the first device that was compact, intuitive, and most importantly had an SDK for developers to extend its base functionality. Developers built tens of thousands of applications for Palm devices. I have many friends who are still hard core Palm users for the simple reason that there are still applications that are just not available yet on newer platforms. Palm was very friendly to developers, providing a free SDK and major discounts on hardware; I bought my first Palm with a 60% developer discount, bundled with an SDK.
The second wave of mobile applications came with the release of J2ME devices. The Java language allowed applications to run on hundreds of millions of devices manufactured by numerous companies such as Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson etc. The Java language also lowered the learning curve for developers, allowing more developers to build more applications. We saw thousands of games and simple utilities appear for a broad range of devices, most being either free or very affordable.
The third wave of mobile applications came with the launch of the BlackBerry SDK. The first two waves of applications were mostly built by hobbyist developers, as there wasn't a large enough commercial market to allow the applications to develop into viable companies. The BlackBerry application platform allowed developers to create very valuable commercial applications for mobile devices inside of enterprises. Hundreds of new profitable companies have formed to develop very useful and successful products for BlackBerry, and enterprises are buying these applications to make their businesses more productive.
I believe that today we are on the cusp of the fourth wave of mobile applications. A whole class of mobile applications is about to be launched, reaching a whole new set of users. The launch of the iPhone SDK and App Store will allow developers to push mobile applications to a new level. The iPhone SDK allows developers to develop rich applications easily that are not restricted by device limitations. The iPhone and iPod Touch have fast processors, rich UI toolkits, massive memory storage, fast networking, innovative inputs such as the multi-touch screen and accelerometer, full 3D OpenGL graphics, and a browser that supports full web 2.0 AJAX applications.
The other aspect that Apple has solved is distribution: on other mobile platforms developers needed to advertise and sell their applications themselves, or deal with hundreds of carriers who didn't care about these comparatively small application developers. The iPhone App Store will allow developers big or small to instantly reach and sell their applications to the entire worldwide user base.
Within a few weeks of the App Store launch, I predict we will see hundreds of applications with amazing UI's and great graphics. There are already over four thousand companies that have committed to deploying the iPhone applications and over twenty thousand more in the application process. I am not saying that the other manufacturers are in trouble, but I'm sure that the other device manufacturers, such as BlackBerry, Nokia, Motorola and Microsoft will be forced to react to this fourth wave and provide richer SDK's to developers and a simple application distribution mechanism.
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