For the next IdeaWarz, Cambrian House is asking our community to review previously submitted mobile app ideas. Google’s ANDROID Developer Challenge combined with the capabilities of the ANDROID platform itself might make 2008 the year cellphone applications finally match consumer’s expectations.

A Bitter J2ME Developer

One of my endeavors before starting at Cambrian House was exploration of MMORPG for (cutting edge at the time) J2ME MIDP 2.0 mobiles.

An important facet of the game would have been GPS location detection, with physical location granting you tactical advantage over your opponents. Imagine a game where combatants regularly met face-to-face in the real world, as they battled online! Would online battle quickly translate into fisticuffs in real life? Inquiring Gordons needed to know!

Alas, hungry Gordons needed to eat, and the last time I worked on the game was December 2005. Had I kept developing the location based game on this emerging platform, where would I be today, 2 years later?

Nowhere. There is no market.

Mobile Carriers Stifle Innovation

While the appearance of mobiles supporting J2ME MIDP 2.0 has flourished, the market is effectively locked down by carriers, both by making it impractical to install 3rd party J2ME apps directly from websites, and denying J2ME access to location based data.

While my game was already designed to operate within the confines of J2ME, the platform itself does not enable the types of applications people intuitively expect from today’s mobiles. Applications written specifically for any given mobile’s built-in operating system can meet these needs, but then the user is still dependent on the carrier for permission to run the app.

Killer J2ME apps have never taken off because:

• Awkward to install (if not occasionally impossible due to carrier restrictions).
• Limited demand. The public does not know what a mobile Java app is, how to find them, or how to install them.
• Fragmented market. Each carrier directs app seekers to its own walled-off marketplace.

Mobiles lack sufficient J2ME support because:

• There is no killer app driving consumer demand for this support.
• User freedom on mobiles competes with paying carriers for ring-tones and platform specific applications.

How manufacturers and mobile carriers might restrict ANDROID is not yet clear. Once again we may end up with crippled phones, but at least the chicken-and-egg problem is about to be solved.

Importance of ANDROID

At the discretion of the user, ANDROID grants full control over the mobile device. There is no distinction between bundled apps, and third party applications. These ANDROID mobiles could mirror the unrestricted software ecosystem found in the world of PC/Mac/Linux desktop software… if carriers don’t cripple the ANDROID mobiles.

Why ANDROID Might Survive Intact

Ever heard of the “gPhone”? You shouldn’t have since its only a label the press tacked on to ANDROID before it was officially announced. There’s no “gPhone” yet, but any phone built on top of the ANDROID stack could reasonably referred to as a gPhone… assuming the full stack is implemented.

Any consumer today looking for J2ME support on their next mobile can’t just look for the word “Java” on the device’s spec sheet. Unless a customer cross-checks developer pages against carrier restrictions, the meaning of Java support is not really clear. You might need to hack your phone to run your Java app. Who expects that?

But a customer will likely be approaching a gPhone will a particular killer app in mind. Google is awarding $10 million in prizes for the best ANDROID applications. In the hands of a larger company, one can imagine $10 million not going to far. To garage developers, start-ups and the open source community, $10 million is a heck of a good incentive. When gPhones appear mid-2008, expect some very compelling 3rd party apps to be already be available.

It’s those applications which will be attracting customers to the gPhone, not the platform itself. And any mobile manufacturer or carrier who keeps their gPhone from running those 3rd party apps will be quickly outed as not offering a true gPhone at all. What would you call an iPhone which couldn’t sync with iTunes? A suckPhone.

Even if the carriers restrict triangulated cell positioning data, Google is citing geotagged WiFi hotspots as an alternative means of gleaning a user’s location. If a gPhone lacks hardware GPS support, it might even be able to request location data from nearby GPS serving gPhones via Bluetooth.

What does ANDROID have to do with Cambrian House?

Because gPhones could potentially run so many mobile applications that can not be supported by J2ME, Cambrian House is reviewing all cell phone idea submissions, and automatically entering any of merit into 2007-11-28’s IdeaWarz.

I’d like Cambrian House community members to take a fresh look at the possibilities offered by tomorrow’s cell phones. Assume they know their own location, have access to all of a modern cellphone’s hardware, and the gPhones can communicate freely with each other.

What would they say and what would they do?

ANDROID Details

Google has summarized ANDROID development features, and I’ve indexed the most important features discussed in their Androidology videos:

Androidology - Part 2 of 3 - Application Lifecycle
Nothing illustrates offering end-user features current phones can not.

Related Articles

Google Android: Initial Impressions and Criticism

On the other hand, the platform seems to be open, so not all is lost. Google is planning to release the SDK under Apache 2.0 license. The current SDK however is not under that license yet. This openness comes however with a few strings attached. Basically, it relies on Java’s security system. You know, the same mechanism that is used by operators and phone vendors to completely lock down J2ME to restrict access to interesting features (e.g. sending SMS, accessing file system, making phone calls, installing applications). I’m not saying that Google will do this but they certainly enable operators and phone vendors to do this for them and are providing all the necessary hooks to make it really easy. This is not surprising since in the current market, operators insist on this, especially in the US. The likely result will be that Android application developers will have to deal with locked down phones just like J2ME developers have to deal with that today.

Not one gPhone, but ‘a thousand’

Four manufacturers in the alliance - Motorola, Samsung, LG and HTC - are expected to begin selling phones featuring the new software during the second half of next year. Eight carriers said they will carry the phones, including Sprint and T-Mobile in the United States and China Mobile, the world’s largest carrier by subscribers.

Does the mobile OS matter?

Most mobile device companies, especially the big ones, are terrible at creating integrated hardware-software solutions. They’re hardware companies, not software companies. The mobile operators are little better; they generally understand voice but not data. So you get a three-way traffic jam of OS vendor, hardware company, and operator, none of whom are in a position to architect the whole solution and make mobile data sing. I do think there’s hope for an application platform to establish itself as a standard in the mobile world, but it needs to be structured and managed differently from anything that’s on the market today.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Cambrian House. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.