What is it that any of these stores offer that the browser doesn't? Could we (as an industry) focus on fixing those things, so that we can have an open standard to develop apps across all devices, but at the same time take full advantage of whatever the hardware offers? Which version of HTML is going to support the multiple cameras that are (or soon will be) present on most of the high-end phones sold?
Making software for full-featured mobile devices that degrades gracefully for those with less features is a hard problem, but a very real one for phone developers. The iPhone isn't going to be the extensively polished de facto monopoly Apple dreamed it would be. Developers do want to write cross-platform applications (and no, Adobe doesn't have the right talent to write a solid "higher order platform").
See, I had the same reaction when web apps started gaining traction: "Look at all the native libraries and UI and tools you're giving up, just to solve the app distribution problem! Solve that, don't take GUIs back 15 years just to fix distribution!"
But, there is more to web apps than just distribution. And, there is more to why people want to write for these mobile devices than just the app stores.
If you've been doing web stuff for a while, you may be surprised to find some of us prefer the tools, APIs, and patterns behind native app development -- just as I was surprised to learn some people had legitimate reasons to make web apps. Some of us have investments in native code that we can move over to these devices. Some of us think having at least some code in the vendor's pet API provides a better user experience, and makes you better able to track with their platform as it changes.
I was wrong to think people only went to the web for distribution. Consider that people may not just be on these native mobile systems for the app stores alone.
I don't think I made my point really clearly: what I was saying is that the web as a platform needs to take whatever are the best tools, API's, and patterns that exist in webOS/Android/iOS, of course. It's the fragmentation of those well designed platforms that I'm seeing an issue with.
Maybe it's best to speak as a hypothetical "developer with an idea" that I'd like to hypothesize to be common: I don't have time to become proficient in developing on webOS/Android/iOS, and I don't want to do a half-assed job by quickly learning a system I'm not familiar with, so I'll pick one (probably iOS, because it provides the biggest reach internationally, and because I have the sense that iOS users are more likely to pay money for apps). I'd prefer to make one quality app, though, and ship it to all app stores, and have it degrade gracefully across devices that have one feature or another. Also, a pony. But seriously: I think Adobe's Flash-to-iOS is a great idea, but I have close to 0 confidence in Adobe being able to maintain it & keep it up to date with changes to the native platform. If Adobe had advocated making iPhone apps by shipping a full-featured Flash-to-HTML5 compiler and vocally advocated pushing HTML standards to reaching feature parity with the iPhone 4, it would be a dream come true.
"Nokia doesn’t seem to be doing a great job of communicating with developers."
The problem is that they offer only e-mail support and they're flooded because they lowered the store fees to 1 EUR and allow apps made with an RSS -> app creator into the store.
This is one of those decisions that can look good on paper, but in practice ends up having negative effects.
I haven't developed for Apple, but I do believe that the App Store is the best store bar none right now.
To offer my own experience, I sent them a question by email and I got an answer within 2 days. Also, forums like forum nokia and qt forums are also incredibly helpful and you get answers pretty fast.
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The difference with Nokia and others is that with Nokia you don't have to use the crappy Ovi store if you don't want to. N900 has relatively huge open-source community distributing their software via so called extras repository, which allows easy distribution of software, without any filtering (it basically has two levels, -devel and -testing. To get into testing you need certain number of upvotes from community.)
Am I the only one annoyed by small surveys like this presenting their results as if they have 1% accuracy?
Assuming that there are about 2000 ovi store developers and with the given sample size of 104 respondents, the 90% confidence error bars on the result are already +/-8%. And that's assuming the sample was properly random, which was not the case.
You are right - it's not necessarily statistically significant. But surveys like this don't have to be in order to give you a feeling for the mood of the community. Also the respondents were recruited from the top Nokia developers (based on downloads) rather than the entire developer population.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 39.6 ms ] threadMaking software for full-featured mobile devices that degrades gracefully for those with less features is a hard problem, but a very real one for phone developers. The iPhone isn't going to be the extensively polished de facto monopoly Apple dreamed it would be. Developers do want to write cross-platform applications (and no, Adobe doesn't have the right talent to write a solid "higher order platform").
But, there is more to web apps than just distribution. And, there is more to why people want to write for these mobile devices than just the app stores.
If you've been doing web stuff for a while, you may be surprised to find some of us prefer the tools, APIs, and patterns behind native app development -- just as I was surprised to learn some people had legitimate reasons to make web apps. Some of us have investments in native code that we can move over to these devices. Some of us think having at least some code in the vendor's pet API provides a better user experience, and makes you better able to track with their platform as it changes.
I was wrong to think people only went to the web for distribution. Consider that people may not just be on these native mobile systems for the app stores alone.
Maybe it's best to speak as a hypothetical "developer with an idea" that I'd like to hypothesize to be common: I don't have time to become proficient in developing on webOS/Android/iOS, and I don't want to do a half-assed job by quickly learning a system I'm not familiar with, so I'll pick one (probably iOS, because it provides the biggest reach internationally, and because I have the sense that iOS users are more likely to pay money for apps). I'd prefer to make one quality app, though, and ship it to all app stores, and have it degrade gracefully across devices that have one feature or another. Also, a pony. But seriously: I think Adobe's Flash-to-iOS is a great idea, but I have close to 0 confidence in Adobe being able to maintain it & keep it up to date with changes to the native platform. If Adobe had advocated making iPhone apps by shipping a full-featured Flash-to-HTML5 compiler and vocally advocated pushing HTML standards to reaching feature parity with the iPhone 4, it would be a dream come true.
Could you expand on that? I thought it was pretty much all about distribution (deploy to one place and everyone can access it from any machine).
I haven't developed for Apple, but I do believe that the App Store is the best store bar none right now.
Assuming that there are about 2000 ovi store developers and with the given sample size of 104 respondents, the 90% confidence error bars on the result are already +/-8%. And that's assuming the sample was properly random, which was not the case.
I mean, if you reverse the number, 37% of the top developers think that publishing on the Ovi store is a bad decision. That doesn't seem so great.