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February 17, 2011 07:00 AM
App Stores and the Rise of Mobile Development
The mobile dev news is good--Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 partnership with Nokia--and bad--Apple's App Store fees
Dev Pro
InstantDoc ID #129714
I confess that I've ignored mobile development for the last few years. However, some recent press announcements have made me rethink mobile application development—even though I have some reservations about the new, potentially ominous, role of app stores.
Why I Ignored Mobile Development... Until Now
Ten years ago, when I still thought Windows CE was cool, I spent a lot of time and effort doing mobile development. I enjoyed mobile development, but Windows CE just sucked the joy out of life. For starters, the platform was buggy: Restarts were pretty much a fact of life across a number of different devices that I owned. That, and some of the decisions made by the UX team seemed to defy logic. For example, the first thing that just about anyone did after buying a Windows CE machine was run out and buy or install a utility that would let them actually close their apps instead of just pushing them into the background. Yet, the UX folks for CE were so adamant about the need to prevent end users from closing their apps that you couldn't actually achieve Microsoft certification for your apps if they provided functionality that would let users close the application.
That, and the day I threw in the towel was when I had a new HTC phone and was trying to do some development work and had to jump through the idiotic setup for a new Wi-Fi network connection. The notion of having to choose whether a connection was public, part of a home network, or part of a business network made me question the sanity of anyone at Microsoft who thought that this was an easy way for end users to somehow "secure" their network interactions. (Imagine my ongoing joy in working with this "feature," as it now exists on servers and desktops.) So, I just completely gave up on Windows CE, realizing that it was never going to be as cool as I had hoped it would become—and lost interest in mobile app development.
My iOS Experiences
Years passed. I bought an iPod Touch. I loved it—because it just worked. Granted it wasn't a computer; it was just a glorified appliance that ran applications. But all my apps just worked, and I never had to reboot it—ever. That, and when I needed something new, I just went to the app store and either bought it or downloaded it. Apple's "less is more" approach won out, to the point where I bought an iPhone, which I've enjoyed for over a year now (and rebooted only once—to switch phone numbers when I moved).
Part of me has toyed with the idea of how fun it might be to create a game or an app for the iPhone. But what stops me is the idea of learning Objective-C—to the point where iOS application development has been something I haven't been very excited about. (Though Professional iPhone Programming with MonoTouch and .NET/C# has made its way into my wish list, and I've taken more than a few peeks at PhoneGap at this point.) Instead, I've just been happy to be a consumer, and, in the process, I've dumped a few bucks into Apple's App Store to the point where I now have nine pages worth of apps on my iPhone (though a number of them were free).
Mobile Development and App Stores
Yet, some recent developments over the past few days have me both thinking more realistically about the possibility of getting back into mobile development while simultaneously almost scaring me away from it.
The recent announcement that has me seriously contemplating mobile development again was the partnership between Nokia and Microsoft announced last week. To me this announcement portends some potentially huge changes in terms of reach for my .NET development skills (even though I'm very rusty with Silverlight). But the idea of potentially reaching huge audiences holds great appeal, especially as a part of me is convinced that mobile development could be a hoot.