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> The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applicati

by SandB0x 16y ago

> The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren't taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we're going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem. Please, please, Nokia, adopt Android and put your efforts into making great hardware to go with it, without ruining the interface like so many other manufacturers do.

Geee 16y ago
War of ecosystems.. Google is their worst competitor. They either join smaller ones like WP7, WebOS, Bada etc. or keep on their own.
robryan 16y ago
This is the way forward, a company that wants to develop native apps for mobile must already work with so many different systems. A new startup is going to focus on an iphone app, if they are successful or well capitalized from the start then they will look at android. The third choice in the market is shaping to be windows 7 phone. Expecting companies to develop for then yet another platform, one which seems to be redefined often, is asking a lot and will result in getting only the really big players and lower rate developers trying to cash in on the under exploited platform. In a way it's similar to Yahoo outsourcing their search to Bing, advertisers focused most of their attention on adwords and then also rolled some Bing campaigns, but only so much attention can then be given to the third player in the market for even less ROI for time spent due to the lower search volume.
- Geee 16y ago
  Not really, Nokia's Ovi Store is now third in downloaded apps per day. However, in many countries such as in China, Ovi Store is the most popular app store. http://www.forum.nokia.com/Distribute/Ovi_Store_statistics.xhtml http://www.forum.nokia.com/Distribute/Ovi_Store_statistics.x...
  - robryan 16y ago
    This says nothing of what the sales are like in China which is notorious for not paying for software. In China currently these phones have a much larger share of the market because they are cheaper than iphones and android phones. Eventually when the prices of the better smartphones fall you would expect a big shift away from nokia unless they can improve on their current offerings. I think we will have to wait some time to for windows 7 phone to pick up some market share before app store figures show whether it is a better bet than nokia in the American market.
  - nl 16y ago
    Pretty much the only people making money on Ovi are game companies. Nothing wrong with that, except that gaming is different to other types of software. Also, note these points: * There are 30,000 apps available * 400,000 new Forum Nokia developers were added in the last 12 months. That really illustrates what a horrible platform Nokia has. 400K new developers were interested in it over the last 12 months, and yet there are only 30K apps in the whole store. Compare that to the adoption that the iOS and Android app stores have had.
    - Geee 16y ago
      The prior development tools for native Symbian have been horrid, combined with difficult signing process etc. However, the transition to Qt and Qt Quick -based apps makes it all very easy and convenient thus enabling the potential better. It's true that it isn't the most exciting platform right now, but it's certainly on the right path.
      - nl 16y ago
        Yeah, but that's like saying that Lotus 123 was on the right path when they finally ported it to Windows. With Qt/Qt Quick you get an environment that is sort of competitive with where iOS and Android were over a year ago. Meanwhile, iOS and Android have moved on and are accelerating development of their SDKs, and Nokia is falling further & further behind. Anyway, say you build your app, thinking how great it will be with the huge reach of the Symbian platform. You ship, and discover that (a) people who have a Symbian phone and can afford to buy your apps are just waiting to upgrade to iOS or Android, and so won't invest any time in new apps on their Nokia phones and (b) Symbian is only growing in use in the developing world, where people are very unlikely to buy your app because the cost is a lot more significant. So you give up, and go back to iOS and Android where the toolsets are nicer and there is more money to be made.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  > This is the way forward, a company that wants to develop native apps for mobile must already work with so many different systems. A new startup is going to focus on an iphone app, if they are successful or well capitalized from the start then they will look at android. The third choice in the market is shaping to be windows 7 phone. I agree with what you said here. But to take it a step further I'd say that the number one rule I've learned from doing mobile native apps the last few years is that ideally one should NOT be making mobile native apps. Make a web app, that just happens to look and interact decently on a mobile device. Saves developers a lot of pain and a lot of time otherwise invested in a more narrow platform set of skills.
  - robryan 16y ago
    For this to be truly a reality you would need mobile developers to expose more functionality to the web app. The web app could also become a common interface with lower level functionality, so say a camera on an android phone and an iphone could both expose a common js interface.
    - wtracy 16y ago
      This is what Palm was trying to achieve with WebOS.
  - apetrovic 16y ago
    > But to take it a step further I'd say that the number one rule I've learned from doing mobile native apps the last few years is that ideally one should NOT be making mobile native apps. Make a web app, that just happens to look and interact decently on a mobile device. Yeah, make a web page so I would need to start the browser first, then wait for the page to load. The GUI and the experience will be completely different than anything what I already have on the phone, not to mention that the GUI will be suboptimal. Transition between screens in the app will be dependent on network coverage - if I'm in the bus and it stops on some blind spot just when I clicked the button, I'll have to watch white screen (or an error message) until the bus moves. And for what? To "save developers a lot of pain". Sounds reasonable, I'm sure I'll give you my money.
  - 16y ago
- blub 16y ago
  WP7 isn't shaping up to be anything. Nokia sold more N8's than all the WP7 manufacturers combined. Secondly, there is room in the market for other players as indicated by Bada's success.
follower 16y ago
I'd rather Nokia actually be the only truly open mobile platform out there. No, Android isn't sufficiently open. It's my phone, at a minimum I should be able to pull all my own data off it in any form I choose.
- wmf 16y ago
  IMO a GNU/free fork of Android would still be a better platform than MeeGo or Symbian, and would be cheaper to develop.
  - joe_the_user 16y ago
    Yes, and you could put QT on top of it!
    - limmeau 16y ago
      A C++ framework on top of a mobile OS in which most interesting things happen in the Dalvik VM? What for?
      - justincormack 16y ago
        I think the hacker expectation is that a free open mobile OS would not be tied to a single programming environment and making it easy to port the mass of existing qt code would be useful.
      - blub 16y ago
        Most interesting things including lawsuits. If things turn sour with Dalvik, Qt already runs on Android.
  - blub 16y ago
    There is no such thing as a free Android, except if you tear the whole Java user space away. And I'm REALLY curious about why you and 14 other people think that Android is such a good mobile OS. The VM is both a legal and speed liability, the Android UI is not GPU-accelerated and the entire OS is still immature (see the embarrassing bugs with the SMS or the browser security holes).
davros 16y ago
What about Meego? If they actually gave it some resources, rather than treat it as an afterthought, it could be great. To date Symbian has sucked all the resources from Meego, but one of the clearest messages was finally admitting reality on Symbian - 'if we continue like before, we will get further and further behind'.
EnderMB 16y ago
One of the big problems with Android at the moment is phone manufacturers not playing ball with its customers. Samsung have repeatedly neglected their phones in favour of releasing more new Android phones. At the moment, HTC is probably the king of Android phones, and most non-casual Android users will probably want to go with them, or with a newer hyped phone. If Nokia were to enter the Android market and promote their open ethos throughout the Android community then the company could make a mint. Something as simple as releasing driver code for their phones so people can modify code to be run on their phones would put them miles in front with the Android community. If Nokia were to do these simple things then projects like the GAOSP wouldn't be so relied on to provide a usable phone with support.
- blub 16y ago
  Please stop thinking like a HN-er when discussing the entire market. If Nokia were to enter the Android market they would be just another Android producer. No one cares about drivers except hackers.
  - EnderMB 16y ago
    People don't care about different drivers, but they care when they want to download the Twitter app, only to realise that their new phone is on 1.6 and that they require 2.1, and Samsung will not upgrade their phone. A lot of open-source projects for community builds of Android get plenty of casual users wanting to get the most out of a phone they're currently tied to that the manufacturer has effectively dropped support for. These problems exist because manufacturers have not thought about these issues, and would rather line their pockets with new customers than provide support for existing customers/suckers.
    - roel_v 16y ago
      Frankly, I don't think most people care, either. They just want a phone that works, where they can find the features they use, and maybe some useful other things, like syncing contacts with gmail. Most people I know with Android devices have never downloaded apps, some have downloaded a few in the first few days they had their phone, and only my most hard-core tech friends download any regularly. Most studies seem to confirm this behaviour. Most people don't even know what a 'phone update' is, and are caught off guard when their phone asks them about it.

by SandB0x 16y ago

Geee 16y ago

War of ecosystems.. Google is their worst competitor. They either join smaller ones like WP7, WebOS, Bada etc. or keep on their own.

robryan 16y ago

This is the way forward, a company that wants to develop native apps for mobile must already work with so many different systems. A new startup is going to focus on an iphone app, if they are successful or well capitalized from the start then they will look at android. The third choice in the market is shaping to be windows 7 phone. Expecting companies to develop for then yet another platform, one which seems to be redefined often, is asking a lot and will result in getting only the really big players and lower rate developers trying to cash in on the under exploited platform. In a way it's similar to Yahoo outsourcing their search to Bing, advertisers focused most of their attention on adwords and then also rolled some Bing campaigns, but only so much attention can then be given to the third player in the market for even less ROI for time spent due to the lower search volume.

Geee 16y ago
Not really, Nokia's Ovi Store is now third in downloaded apps per day. However, in many countries such as in China, Ovi Store is the most popular app store. http://www.forum.nokia.com/Distribute/Ovi_Store_statistics.xhtml http://www.forum.nokia.com/Distribute/Ovi_Store_statistics.x...
- robryan 16y ago
  This says nothing of what the sales are like in China which is notorious for not paying for software. In China currently these phones have a much larger share of the market because they are cheaper than iphones and android phones. Eventually when the prices of the better smartphones fall you would expect a big shift away from nokia unless they can improve on their current offerings. I think we will have to wait some time to for windows 7 phone to pick up some market share before app store figures show whether it is a better bet than nokia in the American market.
- nl 16y ago
  Pretty much the only people making money on Ovi are game companies. Nothing wrong with that, except that gaming is different to other types of software. Also, note these points: * There are 30,000 apps available * 400,000 new Forum Nokia developers were added in the last 12 months. That really illustrates what a horrible platform Nokia has. 400K new developers were interested in it over the last 12 months, and yet there are only 30K apps in the whole store. Compare that to the adoption that the iOS and Android app stores have had.
  - Geee 16y ago
    The prior development tools for native Symbian have been horrid, combined with difficult signing process etc. However, the transition to Qt and Qt Quick -based apps makes it all very easy and convenient thus enabling the potential better. It's true that it isn't the most exciting platform right now, but it's certainly on the right path.
    - nl 16y ago
      Yeah, but that's like saying that Lotus 123 was on the right path when they finally ported it to Windows. With Qt/Qt Quick you get an environment that is sort of competitive with where iOS and Android were over a year ago. Meanwhile, iOS and Android have moved on and are accelerating development of their SDKs, and Nokia is falling further & further behind. Anyway, say you build your app, thinking how great it will be with the huge reach of the Symbian platform. You ship, and discover that (a) people who have a Symbian phone and can afford to buy your apps are just waiting to upgrade to iOS or Android, and so won't invest any time in new apps on their Nokia phones and (b) Symbian is only growing in use in the developing world, where people are very unlikely to buy your app because the cost is a lot more significant. So you give up, and go back to iOS and Android where the toolsets are nicer and there is more money to be made.
mkramlich 16y ago
> This is the way forward, a company that wants to develop native apps for mobile must already work with so many different systems. A new startup is going to focus on an iphone app, if they are successful or well capitalized from the start then they will look at android. The third choice in the market is shaping to be windows 7 phone. I agree with what you said here. But to take it a step further I'd say that the number one rule I've learned from doing mobile native apps the last few years is that ideally one should NOT be making mobile native apps. Make a web app, that just happens to look and interact decently on a mobile device. Saves developers a lot of pain and a lot of time otherwise invested in a more narrow platform set of skills.
- robryan 16y ago
  For this to be truly a reality you would need mobile developers to expose more functionality to the web app. The web app could also become a common interface with lower level functionality, so say a camera on an android phone and an iphone could both expose a common js interface.
  - wtracy 16y ago
    This is what Palm was trying to achieve with WebOS.
- apetrovic 16y ago
  > But to take it a step further I'd say that the number one rule I've learned from doing mobile native apps the last few years is that ideally one should NOT be making mobile native apps. Make a web app, that just happens to look and interact decently on a mobile device. Yeah, make a web page so I would need to start the browser first, then wait for the page to load. The GUI and the experience will be completely different than anything what I already have on the phone, not to mention that the GUI will be suboptimal. Transition between screens in the app will be dependent on network coverage - if I'm in the bus and it stops on some blind spot just when I clicked the button, I'll have to watch white screen (or an error message) until the bus moves. And for what? To "save developers a lot of pain". Sounds reasonable, I'm sure I'll give you my money.
- 16y ago
blub 16y ago
WP7 isn't shaping up to be anything. Nokia sold more N8's than all the WP7 manufacturers combined. Secondly, there is room in the market for other players as indicated by Bada's success.

follower 16y ago

I'd rather Nokia actually be the only truly open mobile platform out there. No, Android isn't sufficiently open. It's my phone, at a minimum I should be able to pull all my own data off it in any form I choose.

wmf 16y ago
IMO a GNU/free fork of Android would still be a better platform than MeeGo or Symbian, and would be cheaper to develop.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  Yes, and you could put QT on top of it!
  - limmeau 16y ago
    A C++ framework on top of a mobile OS in which most interesting things happen in the Dalvik VM? What for?
    - justincormack 16y ago
      I think the hacker expectation is that a free open mobile OS would not be tied to a single programming environment and making it easy to port the mass of existing qt code would be useful.
    - blub 16y ago
      Most interesting things including lawsuits. If things turn sour with Dalvik, Qt already runs on Android.
- blub 16y ago
  There is no such thing as a free Android, except if you tear the whole Java user space away. And I'm REALLY curious about why you and 14 other people think that Android is such a good mobile OS. The VM is both a legal and speed liability, the Android UI is not GPU-accelerated and the entire OS is still immature (see the embarrassing bugs with the SMS or the browser security holes).

davros 16y ago

What about Meego? If they actually gave it some resources, rather than treat it as an afterthought, it could be great. To date Symbian has sucked all the resources from Meego, but one of the clearest messages was finally admitting reality on Symbian - 'if we continue like before, we will get further and further behind'.

EnderMB 16y ago

One of the big problems with Android at the moment is phone manufacturers not playing ball with its customers. Samsung have repeatedly neglected their phones in favour of releasing more new Android phones. At the moment, HTC is probably the king of Android phones, and most non-casual Android users will probably want to go with them, or with a newer hyped phone. If Nokia were to enter the Android market and promote their open ethos throughout the Android community then the company could make a mint. Something as simple as releasing driver code for their phones so people can modify code to be run on their phones would put them miles in front with the Android community. If Nokia were to do these simple things then projects like the GAOSP wouldn't be so relied on to provide a usable phone with support.

blub 16y ago
Please stop thinking like a HN-er when discussing the entire market. If Nokia were to enter the Android market they would be just another Android producer. No one cares about drivers except hackers.
- EnderMB 16y ago
  People don't care about different drivers, but they care when they want to download the Twitter app, only to realise that their new phone is on 1.6 and that they require 2.1, and Samsung will not upgrade their phone. A lot of open-source projects for community builds of Android get plenty of casual users wanting to get the most out of a phone they're currently tied to that the manufacturer has effectively dropped support for. These problems exist because manufacturers have not thought about these issues, and would rather line their pockets with new customers than provide support for existing customers/suckers.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    Frankly, I don't think most people care, either. They just want a phone that works, where they can find the features they use, and maybe some useful other things, like syncing contacts with gmail. Most people I know with Android devices have never downloaded apps, some have downloaded a few in the first few days they had their phone, and only my most hard-core tech friends download any regularly. Most studies seem to confirm this behaviour. Most people don't even know what a 'phone update' is, and are caught off guard when their phone asks them about it.