Four Smartphone Platforms to Dominate the Market
For any software developers bemoaning the pain of having to rewrite apps for each of the many smartphone platforms, there was good news in the fourth quarter of 2009. A developer could reach 75% of the smartphones sold in that quarter by supporting just three platforms, Nokia/Symbian, RIM OS and Apple iPhone OS, according to figures from research firm Strategy Analytics.
Supporting the same three platforms would have enabled a developer to only reach two-thirds of the smartphones sold worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2008. Less fragmentation isn't the only positive trend - the overall pie is substantially bigger. Strategy Analytics estimates that 174 million smartphones were sold in the whole of 2009, compared with 151 million in 2008. If each smartphone has a useful life of two years, that suggests there are more than 300 million smartphones in circulation today around the world.
Big three or big four?
So, should developers be focusing on just the three leading platforms? Probably not. As Google's Android still has plenty of momentum, we could soon be looking at a big four, rather than a big three. But most developers would probably welcome that - a strong performance by Android in 2010 would help cement its position, at the expense of Windows Mobile and LiMo, as the preferred platform for any handset vendor without their own operating system.
As the smartphone market grows further and developers gain greater economies of scale, supporting four key platforms sounds manageable for even small software shops. But those four platforms will mask a lot of complexity - within the Nokia/Symbian ecosystem, there are many different devices with a wide range of capabilities. This is also becoming true of Android and even within the tightly-controlled Apple and RIM stables, not all devices are created equal.
Still, it is clear fragmentation should be less of an issue going forward, particularly if the web mark-up language HTML5 is widely-adopted, paving the way for sophisticated web apps that will be able to run in any high-end browser. Although Apple, in particular, won't want to see its grip on the apps market weakened by web standards that cut across plsatforms, healthy competition between the four leading ecosystems should ensure that HTML5 will eventually win through.
Just because the platforms dominate it doesn't mean that life is any easier for developers. Nor should it be.
It isn't easier because you can't be certain that an appliction will run on all phones with a particular platform. You can't write a single Symbian version, you have to know which handset, which version of the OS and sometimes even which operator load. We'll see application that run on an iPhone 3GS but not a 3G or iPad, and it's already starting to happen with Android too.
This is A Good Thing, because really an application should exploit a handset to the fullest, If it's got a bigger screen that should be used for more varied information; not just the same information scaled up. If it has touch it should be exploited, the same for a trackball or qwerty. Too many Blackberry applications are simple Java programs that don't even know there is a keyboard because the basic java version is written for a phone with a 12 key Bell keypad.
And beyond this remember that Smartphones are a fifth of the mobile phone market. We might think of iPhone as a huge success but apple has only sold 33million iPhones and iPod Touches combined (they have never released seperate figures). We don't know how many 2G iPhones are still in use, but if, at a generous guess we say there are 20 million iPhones in use they represent 0.5% of the global phone market.
HTML5 is all very well for pocket computers ("The device formerly known as the cellphone") but it's not the solution for the 4billion.
Simon