CTIA this week in San Francisco. After listening to some of the big players talk about their strategies, the divisions between the companies are becoming clear and the question is: Which approach will succeed?
Yahoo
Yahoo showed its cards at the keynote speech Wednesday by Marco Boerries, head of Yahoo Mobile. Yahoo has some major mobile applications. OneSearch handles search. OneConnect ties the phone to social networking accounts. And in the future, OnePlace will connect the user to location services. So clearly, creating a suite of mobile applications that can run on any web-enabled phone is a significant focus of theirs.
But Yahoo went a step further this week in announcing Blueprint, which is the foundation for its applications. It is a middleware platform, based on the XML standard, that allows developers to write applications that can run on thousands of web-enabled cell phones, regardless of carrier or phone maker. Blueprint handles tasks such as rendering, or displaying the application in the correct way on phones with different-size screens. That sounds a lot like what Sun's Java environment was supposed to do: "write once, run anywhere." But the reality of Java was that it required developers to do a lot of work tailoring applications for certain phones, said Marc Davis, chief scientist at Yahoo Connected Life, in an interview after the keynote.
Yahoo put a stake in the ground with Blueprint. While others are trying to get PC applications to run on phones, Davis said Yahoo believes developers should architect their mobile applications to run on cell phones from the ground up -- not repurpose PC apps.
Adobe
By contrast, that's exactly what Adobe wants to do. Shantanu Narayen, chief executive of Adobe, used his keynote today at CTIA to describe the evolution of the PC software industry and how common standards enabled the Internet to take off. That same sort of standardization should help demand for mobile web apps.
Adobe believes that ease of development means taking what people already know -- how to make applications for the desktop -- and figuring out how to painlessly adapt that to mobile phones. He showed how a music playback application, Fine Tune, written in Adobe's Flash environment can run on either the web, desktop PC or a mobile phone. Narayen said that Adobe is putting energy into tools such as Adobe Device Central to make sure that the apps run across all sorts of phones. It has also formed a consortium, the Open Screen Project, with lots of developers, media companies, hardware makers and carriers on board. Members include Intel, Qualcomm, NTT Docomo, Nokia, MTV and others.
Microsoft isn't a member of that group. It has its own competing technologies, such as the Windows Mobile operating system, which ensures app compatibility with Windows for desktops. And it has its own new competitor to Adobe's Flash, dubbed Silverlight. Applications developed for Silverlight can run on a variety of desktop and mobile platforms.
With Android, Google has made the argument that middleware tools just aren't enough. The operating system has to be tailored to run mobile web applications as well. Google wants its applications to run across a lot of different phones, from simple to high-end models. It also wants developers to produce an open, Linux-based platform that has a common infrastructure. It wants enough variety in the Android platform to satisfy all sorts of third-party developers, but it also wants to ensure an app will run on all Android phones. And it believes that an app running on a platform natively will ensure fast speed.
Nokia
By contrast, Nokia has gone a couple of directions itself. At first, it tried to attract a bunch of partners to its Symbian operating system, which was set up to make sure that Microsoft didn't dominate the mobile web. Symbian is certainly older than Android, but it runs on a ton of phones. And now Nokia has acquired all of it again, making a bet that desiging its own hardware and its own operating system will result in the best platform for mobile developers.
Apple
Then there is Apple, which has the enormously successful iPhone platform. It isn't here at CTIA, but its go-it-alone strategy is well known. Apps developed for the iPhone's App Store have to be written the way that Apple wants. Its software on the iPhone shares a lot of commonalities with the Mac OS for the desktop. But Apple isn't as interested in interoperability with tons of other phones or carriers. So far, it is incredibly successful. But it remains to be seen where the army of developers will throw their efforts. Does it make sense to develop for the iPhone while it has fewer than 10 million units, or should developers stick with Nokia's Symbian platform with hundreds of millions of customers?
Other platforms
Then there are developers such as Mytopia who roll their own. The cell phone game company looked around for a development platform a couple of years ago and it decided to do its own. Since games are demanding applications, Mytopia needed something that was fast, but it also wanted to make its games cross platform so that someone in a poker game on a PC could play against another player on a cell phone, said Guy Ben-Artzi, chief executive of Mytopia. The result is RUGS (real-time universal gaming system), which the company is now considering licensing out to others. Mytopia thus shows the path that other developers can take: developing what they need to make their content work the right way on a lot of platforms.