A lot of developers have complained about the App Store feedback process. For one thing, nothing prevents a rival developer leaving a bad review. For another, Apple only solicit reviews from dissatisfied users. What can be done to get better reviews to counter-balance the bad ones? Maybe we could invite happy users to leave a review…

I’m a little sceptical that this will work. As a developer it’s easy to imagine that a user will be happy to sing the praises of your application. As a user, however, my time is precious, and it’s just too easy to hit the cancel button. Having a “Review this app” button on the Info page might work better — I’d be interested to see what people think though!

Finally, we have a distribution mechanism for S60 applications. Despite all the problems with developing for S60 — the steep learning curve, the painful testing procedure, the complex UIs — the primary barrier to releasing an S60 product has always been the same. How do we sell the thing?! The success of the App Store is purely driven by the ease of distribution*, allowing a developer to ship applications around the world at the touch of a button. Prior to OVI, the only way to sell an app on S60 was to either do it yourself (painful and expensive), use Handango (which takes a 50% revenue share!), or talk to an operator (requires the patience of Job).

Obviously it is going to be harder to develop an S60 application than an iPhone one. But the S60 platform is so much more capable than the iPhone that we can hope to see seriously innovative applications out there. Admittedly these will be priced at a premium level. But quality applications will drive a market, and increase the popularity of the S60 platform. It will be interesting to see whether an S60 phone becomes a status symbol in the same way that iPhone has done - and whether the applications you have on your idle screen become as telling as they do on iPhone!

Time will tell. Airsource will certainly be watching OVI with interest.

* Let’s be clear what we mean here. Distribution is not the same as Marketing. You still need to market your applications, no matter how you sell them.

I have just spent four days in Barcelona at MWC catching up on the industry developments. The main topic on everyone’s lips was The App Store, and by “The” App Store I mean Apple’s, not Nokia’s OVI offering or any of the other contenders.

Let’s take a little look at OVI. Nokia claim that there is an initial market of 50 million handsets. I disagree. Unless Carphone Warehouse go out onto the high street and start pulling people into their store and upgrading their phones for them, the vast majority of smart phone users are not going to install the OVI software. There are two reasons. Firstly, the entire motivation for an App Store on device is that users are not prepared to go through the pain of downloading software and installing it. So why, exactly, are they going to download software (OVI) and install it? Secondly, developing applications for S60* is simply a lot harder than developing them for iPhone, and takes more time. Moreover, those applications need to be tested on the entire range of OVI devices. So the applications either need to cost more (for the same number of sales), or have a wider market (which they haven’t got). With over 10 million iPhones out there, all with an active user population downloading and buying applications, Nokia need a very substantial uptake of their S60 handsets just to get applications shipping at anywhere near the same price level.

It isn’t going to happen. You read it here first.

Tomorrow - why I think that OVI beats the App Store!

* I realise that OVI supports S40 — i.e. MIDP — as well. I am ignoring MIDP since you can’t do anything that useful in it (games notwithstanding). It’s even more restrictive than the iPhone SDK.

An old colleague of mine who used to work at Microsoft told me that he once went to a global summit, to find people standing on tables shouting “Show Me The Money”. As a business strategy, it doesn’t work too badly. It fell out of favour in the 2000 bubble, but we’re all older and wiser now. Right?

I went down to London last night along with Nick (CEO) to visit the Mobile Monday event, rescheduled from last week due to England’s inability to cope with any snow. It was kindly sponsored by Ikivo and OMTP. Unfortunately we didn’t take any pictures as we were all too busy playing with Optiscan on our phones, but we did listen to the speakers.

The general theme of the evening was the construction of a widgets platform supporting mobile, but not exclusively so, and incorporating all sorts of fun things. One aspect seemed to be lacking from the discussion though, and come the Q&A, both our hands shot up. Nick got the mike and said “Sounds great. But how do I make money out of it”.

We just launched Optiscan on iPhone, and one of the key reasons for choosing that platform was the way we can talk to one person - Apple - and sell around the world. If we want to get operator tie in on just about any other platform we need to go talk to umpteen different operators, and maybe ship in six months time if we’re very lucky. Apple takes a week or two. It’s just easy, and lets us focus on development and on marketing.

An open widgets platform is fantastic - provided that all the operators and manufacturers get together and implement it in the same way, with exactly the same financial structures, and no subtle differences to APIs such as we see with BREW or MIDP. If it happens, great. But in the meantime, I won’t be holding my breath. I’ll be following the money.

I discovered an incredibly useful resource yesterday - Mobclix. Among other things, they let you see a graph of how your iPhone App Store application - or anyone else’s - is getting on. For instance, here’s Home Barista. (more…)

Apparently, web apps may not be quite the cure-all that everyone thought they were. The linked article gives five reasons why a browser-based app may not be the best idea.

Here’s five of my own, related to cell phone web apps.

• A website doesn’t know where you are. Even the most basic phone can tell what country its in - but the most advanced website can only guess.
• Bandwidth is not free. It is both quicker and cheaper to perform simple actions (like drawing graphs) on device rather than incurring a round-trip to a server.
• C is not dead. Despite what Java aficionados may like to think, C-based languages still have a place in the world of embedded software, particularly where performance critical applications are concerned. On a cell-phone, just about everything is performance critical.
• Write Once, Run Anywhere doesn’t work.You will have just as many platform bugs if you use web-based technologies - and they will be harder to find, not easier.
• A secret known to two people is no secret. If my private data is sat on my phone, then you pretty much have to get the phone out of my hands to get at my secrets. If however, the data is all on a website somewhere, then the number of potential vulnerabilities just sky rocketed.

And one final thought. Ebay, Facebook, and Google Maps all started as web apps, and now have cell phone clients.

Back in my original Save the Bits article, I noted that a foreign currency application on the iPhone, which I’ll refer to as AppX, uploaded 16K of data and downloaded 136K just to render a graph.

I said I’d get back when I’d run a packet sniffer. I’ve just done that, and the results aren’t pretty. (more…)

Anyone with a Macbook knows that the MagSafe (TM) tip for the charger is pretty cool - apart from the fact that you can’t get any third party accessories for it, because Apple don’t license it. My charger recently started getting rather temperamental due to kink in the cable. The damage was right next to the MagSafe (TM) tip, so I couldn’t just chop the cable and reconnect. I had a look on ebay, and discovered that there were some cheaper chargers available, and bought one. It turned up pretty quickly, and worked just fine. Once. I paid just over £20 for something that costs £58 from the Apple store (having just checked) so I shouldn’t be surprised that it wasn’t genuine Apple. I didn’t expect it to be made of cheese though. I cracked it open very easily, and desoldered the main lead and the tip with the intention of swapping it over to the original charger. No such luck. The Apple box was considerably better built, and resisted my attempts to open it. I ended up cutting the lead, and connecting the old wire to the new wire and tip (which at least appears to be reasonable quality). That worked perfectly, but next time I’ll just go to the Apple Store - particularly because subsequent googling suggests that they might actually have replaced it for free.

One day I’ll get round to reading the manual for all the devices I use on a day to day basis. No doubt I’ll then discover lots of things I never knew - and from then on, life will be more productive, but more boring. In the meantime, I can continue to bump into cute features that surprise me.

I just discovered that if you drag a file to the iPhone Simulator, then it will open (or at least attempt to) the file in Safari. It works for images - very useful for adding images to the PhotoLibrary. I’ve just tried it on a PDF, text, and HTML file, and they all worked as well. A lot easier than typing in the URL to your test site.

I am pretty network agnostic. If I were buying a new phone contract tomorrow, I would not really care which network operator I used. Obviously I’d check out the details of the contract - but the name of the operator is not significant. With one exception - they have to issue a PAC code over the phone. If an operator isn’t prepared to let me leave, then I’m not prepared to join them in the first place. (more…)