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I have a feeling this guy doesnt know what he's talking about. I see what he's trying to say, but he probably shouldn't talk about something he's not involved i

I have a feeling this guy doesnt know what he's talking about. I see what he's trying to say, but he probably shouldn't talk about something he's not involved in or is familiar with. Take point #3 for example. Has he not heard of OTA installation? That is the way things are done nowadays, not transfer over the USB cable. Basically all of his points are BS with the exception of #1. Compatibility differences really are the problem with cell phone development. But this really just makes the barriers for entry higher. Cool things are still possible. Also, I'm not seeing THAT many cell phone startups right now.. At least not as many as I would expect.

Alex3917 20y ago
Reason #12 not to go into mobile wireless: Not even the people writing about it have any idea what they're talking about. :-)
danw 20y ago
#1 is a bit off. As a result of the huge variety of handsets available the mobile industry has very strict adherence to standards. JavaME is available on most handsets providing a consistent platform for use accross hundreds of devices. WAP has been an established mobile web standard since the late 90s and is consistently supported. There are dozens of different mobile browsers and they all work. Theres a lot less cross browser compatability trouble than with desktops even with more browsers! There are two main problems with mobile currently: device UI and carriers. Here in the EU at least carriers are openning up and encouraging users to try data services. Many now offer monthly flat rate data packages, such as Three who bundle skype, slingbox, etc with the package. T-Mobile even has a "well never charge you more than Â£1 a day for your data access" for pay as you go users. The operators now understand that they can make money from being mobile payment providers, identity solutions, ad brokers, etc instead of just charging huge ammounts for data. So things are looking up. It may be 5-10 years before mobile web and apps are as mature as the desktop is now but there is so much potential thats it shouldnt be dissmissed so quickly.
- Tichy 20y ago
  I have worked in J2ME games development for two years and I can say that #1 is not off at all. There is no way around testing your application on all possible phones, because they all come with the weirdest bugs. For an example of what to expect: on some phones, PNG images show up broken if they are structured in a certain way (ie pixel dimensions not an even number or dimensions of image exceed screen size). Some method calls just crash the phone. Persistence might take forever or not work at all. Starting the application might take forever - on some phones it is slow if you load lots of small files, on other phones it is slow if you load fewer big files. And it IS a pain to adapt to all possible screen sizes - granted, it might be a problem of designing the application, but as I was working on games, the design was often based on fixed size images. Especially as font support is crap with J2ME. Maybe flash for mobiles does a better job, haven't tried it. Another thing that used to suck with J2ME: there is no standard for text entry, so it is difficult to integrate text entry nicely into your application. The only standard way is to switch to a blank screen that supports your phones text entry method, so you can't integrate it into your design. Another problem, which I currently face: even if you know what phones you support, how can your customer know? Phones are usually not labeled with their technical name, so if you say "Nokia 6230i supported", it might mean nothing to your customer. I wouldn't say it is impossible to make money with mobile applications, though. It seems also the price for mobile networking is falling. Edit: the mobile games company I was working for was and is very successful and also in the meantime was bought by a big international entertainment company (think the Coca Cola of Entertainment). When I was there it was a 7 people company, so I think it qualifies as a successful startup (I think now they have 50 employees).
  - danw 20y ago
    Plus handests have different proprietary apis for the more advanced stuff in j2me. Certainly as soon as you start trying to do anything 'interesting' it becomes a nightmare and there is a lot of space to improve. Mobile widgets might prove to be a good solution. I forgot another problem: uncertainty about monetization. Theres no proven way to make money on mobile yet. Do you go ad supported? Sell to operators, device makers or users? Charge micropayments or subscriptions? It's hard to pitch a mobile startup when you dont know how you're going to make money from it!
sethjohn 20y ago
So maybe the article doesn't enlighten those of you with extensive knowledge of the technology/market, but it did a great job of answering my basic questions. I can think of about a million cool cell-phone apps, none of which exist yet. Conversely, there are about 10x as many web apps as I would ever need. There must be reasons why this is so...if it's not the ones listed here, what are they?
- Alex3917 20y ago
  Maybe I should have posted a disclaimer about the intended audience. 1) This was written from a social perspective, not an engineering perspective. If you are looking at it from the point of view of the engineer, a lot of these wouldn't make sense or would seem trivial. 2) This was written for two kids in a garage, not huge corporations. Certainly if you throw enough resources into mobile you can create some cool stuff, but for two college kids to try it would be like launching a home-by-christmas offensive of Russia.
  - jsjenkins168 20y ago
    I should have noticed this was written by the person posting it here :( Wasn't trying to bash your blog, you bring up good points for developers new to cell phones to consider.
    - Alex3917 20y ago
      Well I think you are right too, in the sense that many of the points I mention probably don't overlap much with the challenges that corporate engineers in the industry face on a day-to-day basis. That being said, I think they are still important when considering things from the two guys in a garage perspective.

Alex3917 20y ago

Reason #12 not to go into mobile wireless: Not even the people writing about it have any idea what they're talking about. :-)

danw 20y ago

#1 is a bit off. As a result of the huge variety of handsets available the mobile industry has very strict adherence to standards. JavaME is available on most handsets providing a consistent platform for use accross hundreds of devices. WAP has been an established mobile web standard since the late 90s and is consistently supported. There are dozens of different mobile browsers and they all work. Theres a lot less cross browser compatability trouble than with desktops even with more browsers! There are two main problems with mobile currently: device UI and carriers. Here in the EU at least carriers are openning up and encouraging users to try data services. Many now offer monthly flat rate data packages, such as Three who bundle skype, slingbox, etc with the package. T-Mobile even has a "well never charge you more than Â£1 a day for your data access" for pay as you go users. The operators now understand that they can make money from being mobile payment providers, identity solutions, ad brokers, etc instead of just charging huge ammounts for data. So things are looking up. It may be 5-10 years before mobile web and apps are as mature as the desktop is now but there is so much potential thats it shouldnt be dissmissed so quickly.

Tichy 20y ago
I have worked in J2ME games development for two years and I can say that #1 is not off at all. There is no way around testing your application on all possible phones, because they all come with the weirdest bugs. For an example of what to expect: on some phones, PNG images show up broken if they are structured in a certain way (ie pixel dimensions not an even number or dimensions of image exceed screen size). Some method calls just crash the phone. Persistence might take forever or not work at all. Starting the application might take forever - on some phones it is slow if you load lots of small files, on other phones it is slow if you load fewer big files. And it IS a pain to adapt to all possible screen sizes - granted, it might be a problem of designing the application, but as I was working on games, the design was often based on fixed size images. Especially as font support is crap with J2ME. Maybe flash for mobiles does a better job, haven't tried it. Another thing that used to suck with J2ME: there is no standard for text entry, so it is difficult to integrate text entry nicely into your application. The only standard way is to switch to a blank screen that supports your phones text entry method, so you can't integrate it into your design. Another problem, which I currently face: even if you know what phones you support, how can your customer know? Phones are usually not labeled with their technical name, so if you say "Nokia 6230i supported", it might mean nothing to your customer. I wouldn't say it is impossible to make money with mobile applications, though. It seems also the price for mobile networking is falling. Edit: the mobile games company I was working for was and is very successful and also in the meantime was bought by a big international entertainment company (think the Coca Cola of Entertainment). When I was there it was a 7 people company, so I think it qualifies as a successful startup (I think now they have 50 employees).
- danw 20y ago
  Plus handests have different proprietary apis for the more advanced stuff in j2me. Certainly as soon as you start trying to do anything 'interesting' it becomes a nightmare and there is a lot of space to improve. Mobile widgets might prove to be a good solution. I forgot another problem: uncertainty about monetization. Theres no proven way to make money on mobile yet. Do you go ad supported? Sell to operators, device makers or users? Charge micropayments or subscriptions? It's hard to pitch a mobile startup when you dont know how you're going to make money from it!

sethjohn 20y ago

So maybe the article doesn't enlighten those of you with extensive knowledge of the technology/market, but it did a great job of answering my basic questions. I can think of about a million cool cell-phone apps, none of which exist yet. Conversely, there are about 10x as many web apps as I would ever need. There must be reasons why this is so...if it's not the ones listed here, what are they?

Alex3917 20y ago
Maybe I should have posted a disclaimer about the intended audience. 1) This was written from a social perspective, not an engineering perspective. If you are looking at it from the point of view of the engineer, a lot of these wouldn't make sense or would seem trivial. 2) This was written for two kids in a garage, not huge corporations. Certainly if you throw enough resources into mobile you can create some cool stuff, but for two college kids to try it would be like launching a home-by-christmas offensive of Russia.
- jsjenkins168 20y ago
  I should have noticed this was written by the person posting it here :( Wasn't trying to bash your blog, you bring up good points for developers new to cell phones to consider.
  - Alex3917 20y ago
    Well I think you are right too, in the sense that many of the points I mention probably don't overlap much with the challenges that corporate engineers in the industry face on a day-to-day basis. That being said, I think they are still important when considering things from the two guys in a garage perspective.