Technical and Business Challenges for Mobile Application Developers. Tony Wasserman Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley Mobicase 2010

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1 Technical and Business Challenges for Mobile Application Developers Tony Wasserman Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley Mobicase 2010

2 The Growth of Mobile Applications From zero to 500,000 (or so) in 3 years! Before the iphone Extremely limited revenue opportunities Text-based WAP/WML mobile web sites with keyboard and arrow-based input Handset manufacturers and network operators offered developer programs Operators ran walled gardens Developers had to arrange deals with network operators in each territory

3 And now. just for a start

4 Business Opportunities in Mobile Product licensing In-product advertising Upgrades Development tools Custom development Mobile apps market to grow to $30B by 2015 (Juniper Research) Other forecasts at

5 And now the challenge. Lots of smartphones

6 And now the challenge. Lots of smartphones and lots of operating systems iphone Android BlackBerry Symbian WinPhone 7 HP Palm Meego

7 Platform fragmentation - Android

8 What s a Developer to Do? We tried to find out how developers make decisions about which platforms and devices to support We were interested in both the business and technical aspects of their decision-making process We had a few starting hypotheses for our study

9 Survey Hypotheses Both business and technical factors drive developers to choose the technologies for mobile application development Developers technical background and the ease of development affect their selections of mobile platform(s) Developers attitude towards technical or business drivers is dependent on their company size or industry sector Developers attitude towards open source development and their thinking about openness is a driver for choosing development platform

10 Some observations Today s mobile developers are mostly small businesses, and frequently individuals Majority of current apps are consumer-oriented Enterprises rely more on mobile web apps and on mobile browsers, not on native apps Multiple programming languages and environments needed for cross-platform development Developers rarely use systematic development approaches Marketing is mostly done through app stores and social networking sites

11 Development Environments by platform Android: Eclipse + ADT plugin (Java) ios: Xcode (Objective-C) Windows Phone 7: Visual Studio + Expression Blend (Silverlight) BlackBerry: Eclipse + JDE (Java) Symbian: Qt + Visual Studio or Carbide (C++) WebOS: W3C DOM + HP Editor (HTML) MeeGo: Qt + platform-specific tools One size does not fit all!

12 Development Environments by openness Android: Eclipse + ADT plugin (Java) ios: Xcode (Objective-C) Windows Phone 7: Visual Studio + Expression Blend (Silverlight) BlackBerry: Eclipse + JDE (Java) Symbian: Qt + Visual Studio or Carbide (C++) WebOS: W3C DOM + HP Editor + Flash (HTML) MeeGo: Qt + platform-specific tools All platforms have elements of openness.

13 Many Business Challenges Remain Which platforms to support? Which devices for a specific platform? Partnerships with handset mfrs and network operators Revenue models for products Long-term support needed for enterprise apps

14 Many Technical Challenges Remain Minimizing effort for cross-platform and multi-device development Testing applications on various devices and networks, e.g. 3G, WiMax, LTE, WiFi, various carriers Assuring app robustness and reliability under heavy loads and intermittent connections Addressing device features and functionality Applying best practices for software engineering to mobile application development

15 A Research Agenda for Mobile SE Enhancing the User Experience Widgets, touch, sensors, keyboards (physical and virtual) How to identify use cases for mobile users Non-functional requirements Different behavior at different connection speeds? Special data integrity needs Power consumption Development processes, tools, and architectures Portability and cross-platform development

16 Cross-platform Development Tools Numerous tools Appcelerator Rhodes PhoneGap DragonRAD Kyte appmobi Incomplete platform support Incomplete feature support Gestures Accelerometer

17 Contact information Anthony I. (Tony) Wasserman post: Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley Moffett Field, CA USA tel: (m) Skype: tony.wasserman Twitter: twasserman