July 20, 2009, 7:55 pm
Developing software for mobile devices is a bit of passion of mine — or perhaps I should call it a pathology. Unfortunately, I sometimes have some difficulty deciding which platform to spend time working on as they each have intrigue and merit, and over time my clients ask for applications on different platforms so I cannot simply ignore the question. With my product manager hat on where I am concerned about which platforms are viable and likely to stick around for a while, some platforms are simply more attractive than others from this commercial perspective — BlackBerry and iPhone come to mind.
Research in Motion, the folks behind the BlackBerry family of devices, have sold tens of millions of their addictive devices, and an argument could be made that up until the most recent device launches their devices have been mediocre ‚Äî but that has not stopped them from dominating the enterprise business marketplace. Then there is the ‚Äútoo sexy for my pda‚Äù iPhone which boasts over a billion application downloads recorded at the iTunes App Store in just a year ‚Äî mostly consumer oriented applications, though the enterprise market has been penetrated by the Caped Crusaders from Cupertino. Look out McDonalds, the folks at Apple might be stealing your ‚ÄúBillions and Billions Served‚Äù signs. Add in the legions of Android developers and the growing rumors of potential new Android-powered devices and we just cannot ignore Android…
