Cell Phone Software: The Billion-Dollar Sand Trap • Hacker News Board

Re: Cell Phone Software: The Billion-Dollar Sand Trap

#11

Post by danw » Thu, May 03, 2007, 5:14 PM UTC

Tichy wrote: post #10

danw wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus handests have different proprietary apis for the more advanced stuff in j2me. Certainly as soon as you start trying to do anything 'interesting' it becomes a nightmare and there is a lot of space to improve. Mobile widgets might prove to be a good solution. I forgot another problem: uncertainty about monetization. Theres no proven way to make money on mobile yet. Do you go ad supported? Sell to operators, device…

Here in germany several companies are making good money with mobile phones. Usually the payment is all through "premium SMS", which can cost up to 5. So you can sell an application for 5 by having the user send an SMS to a certain number (you can also make it a monthly charge of 5, if you are lucky). Not sure how it works in the US. A huge share of the 5 goes to the operator, I think at least 40%, but it still wo…

it has a very bad reputation where I live because mostly the industry was ripping of kids

Same here in the UK. There are a lot of companies tricking kids into premium subscription services for ringtones, etc.

Perhaps there is an oppertunity for a mobile marketplace/portal for applications? I think there are plenty of these for games, but are there any for apps? If the portal handled distribution, easy installation, etc it could work.

Re: Cell Phone Software: The Billion-Dollar Sand Trap

#12

Post by sethjohn » Thu, May 03, 2007, 5:16 PM UTC

jsjenkins168 wrote: post #2

I have a feeling this guy doesnt know what he's talking about. I see what he's trying to say, but he probably shouldn't talk about something he's not involved in or is familiar with. Take point #3 for example. Has he not heard of OTA installation? That is the way things are done nowadays, not transfer over the USB cable. Basically all of his points are BS with the exception of #1. Compatibility differences really are…

So maybe the article doesn't enlighten those of you with extensive knowledge of the technology/market, but it did a great job of answering my basic questions.

I can think of about a million cool cell-phone apps, none of which exist yet. Conversely, there are about 10x as many web apps as I would ever need. There must be reasons why this is so...if it's not the ones listed here, what are they?

Re: Cell Phone Software: The Billion-Dollar Sand Trap

#13

Post by Tichy » Thu, May 03, 2007, 5:29 PM UTC

jsjenkins168 wrote: post #9

Tichy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have worked in J2ME games development for two years and I can say that #1 is not off at all. There is no way around testing your application on all possible phones, because they all come with the weirdest bugs. For an example of what to expect: on some phones, PNG images show up broken if they are structured in a certain way (ie pixel dimensions not an even number or dimensions of image exceed screen size). Some me…

You definitely speak the truth. I think where the issues really show is when you try using the optional APIs, such as MMAPI. There is no requirement for specific codec support for example, which is a nightmare when trying to develop media applications in J2ME. You literally have to test on all devices or go through a beta program with a bunch of users with different phones and simply see if it breaks or not. For a sm…

I find myself thinking more about J2ME applications lately, but for a while I was also expecting that eventually PDAs would dominate the market. So same as you, I was more drawn to Windows Mobile, although I don't have any experience with it. Another option would be to go "web based", if prices for networking continue to fall (in Germany I think you can get a Flatrate for 25 now - still too much for, say, an occasional gamer, but perhaps feasible for serious applications).

As for APIs, of course over time working with the devices one also builds a set of abstractions, so that it gets easier and easier to support multiple phones for future developments.

Re: Cell Phone Software: The Billion-Dollar Sand Trap

#14

Post by Alex3917 » Thu, May 03, 2007, 6:33 PM UTC

sethjohn wrote: post #12

jsjenkins168 wrote: post #2

I have a feeling this guy doesnt know what he's talking about. I see what he's trying to say, but he probably shouldn't talk about something he's not involved in or is familiar with. Take point #3 for example. Has he not heard of OTA installation? That is the way things are done nowadays, not transfer over the USB cable. Basically all of his points are BS with the exception of #1. Compatibility differences really are…

So maybe the article doesn't enlighten those of you with extensive knowledge of the technology/market, but it did a great job of answering my basic questions. I can think of about a million cool cell-phone apps, none of which exist yet. Conversely, there are about 10x as many web apps as I would ever need. There must be reasons why this is so...if it's not the ones listed here, what are they?

Maybe I should have posted a disclaimer about the intended audience.

1) This was written from a social perspective, not an engineering perspective. If you are looking at it from the point of view of the engineer, a lot of these wouldn't make sense or would seem trivial.

2) This was written for two kids in a garage, not huge corporations. Certainly if you throw enough resources into mobile you can create some cool stuff, but for two college kids to try it would be like launching a home-by-christmas offensive of Russia.

Re: Cell Phone Software: The Billion-Dollar Sand Trap

#15

Post by jsjenkins168 » Thu, May 03, 2007, 6:47 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #14

sethjohn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So maybe the article doesn't enlighten those of you with extensive knowledge of the technology/market, but it did a great job of answering my basic questions. I can think of about a million cool cell-phone apps, none of which exist yet. Conversely, there are about 10x as many web apps as I would ever need. There must be reasons why this is so...if it's not the ones listed here, what are they?

Maybe I should have posted a disclaimer about the intended audience. 1) This was written from a social perspective, not an engineering perspective. If you are looking at it from the point of view of the engineer, a lot of these wouldn't make sense or would seem trivial. 2) This was written for two kids in a garage, not huge corporations. Certainly if you throw enough resources into mobile you can create some cool stu…

I should have noticed this was written by the person posting it here :( Wasn't trying to bash your blog, you bring up good points for developers new to cell phones to consider.

Re: Cell Phone Software: The Billion-Dollar Sand Trap

#16

Post by stuki » Thu, May 03, 2007, 7:10 PM UTC

In my admittedly old fashioned view, the killer app for phones is talk, and the competition is too entrenched :).

Re: Cell Phone Software: The Billion-Dollar Sand Trap

#17

Post by Alex3917 » Thu, May 03, 2007, 8:48 PM UTC

jsjenkins168 wrote: post #15

Alex3917 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I should have posted a disclaimer about the intended audience. 1) This was written from a social perspective, not an engineering perspective. If you are looking at it from the point of view of the engineer, a lot of these wouldn't make sense or would seem trivial. 2) This was written for two kids in a garage, not huge corporations. Certainly if you throw enough resources into mobile you can create some cool stu…

I should have noticed this was written by the person posting it here :( Wasn't trying to bash your blog, you bring up good points for developers new to cell phones to consider.

Well I think you are right too, in the sense that many of the points I mention probably don't overlap much with the challenges that corporate engineers in the industry face on a day-to-day basis. That being said, I think they are still important when considering things from the two guys in a garage perspective.

Re: Cell Phone Software: The Billion-Dollar Sand Trap

#18

Post by Tichy » Thu, May 03, 2007, 9:54 PM UTC

danw wrote: post #11

Tichy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in germany several companies are making good money with mobile phones. Usually the payment is all through "premium SMS", which can cost up to 5. So you can sell an application for 5 by having the user send an SMS to a certain number (you can also make it a monthly charge of 5, if you are lucky). Not sure how it works in the US. A huge share of the 5 goes to the operator, I think at least 40%, but it still wo…

it has a very bad reputation where I live because mostly the industry was ripping of kids Same here in the UK. There are a lot of companies tricking kids into premium subscription services for ringtones, etc. Perhaps there is an oppertunity for a mobile marketplace/portal for applications? I think there are plenty of these for games, but are there any for apps? If the portal handled distribution, easy installation, e…

I'd like to think there is. How did the Palm Pilot homepage fare, anyway, they used to sell serious applications for Palm Pilots?

At least in Germany the established players seem to have a firm believe that the only ways to make serious money are through excessive TV advertising and abo schemes, or to be on the WAP pages of the actual carriers. There must be a huge untapped market out there, though - I don't know anybody who ever surfed their carriers WAP pages.

I am currently setting up a dedicated homepage for my mobile phone application, hoping to tap some other channels. I guess I will report back to YC news in a few weeks about it's success or failure.

Re: Cell Phone Software: The Billion-Dollar Sand Trap

#19

Post by danw » Fri, May 04, 2007, 1:05 AM UTC

stuki wrote: post #16

In my admittedly old fashioned view, the killer app for phones is talk, and the competition is too entrenched :).

Talk is great but I know many here in the UK who don't use the phone for talk, just SMS. I used to be one of them! As a teenager on a PAYG phone voice seemed too pricey. The per message charging for SMS was preferred than the per minute for voice. You knew exactly what a text was going to cost as opposed to a phone call that could drag on. Usually we would spend more on texting back and forth than the phone call would have cost but we still did it because of the consistency.

There are plenty of places to innovate even with voice. Theres no mobile white pages (those great big hulking phone books that contain all of the phone numbers of people living nearby) for example. Voicemail and other forms of asyncronus voice are ripe for improvement. Possibly even a 'voice twitter' that would let you record 60 second snippets of audio and broadcast them over website, skype, MMS etc. Micro-podcasting as it were!

Like you, I'm sure voice phone calls will remain the predominant use for a phone but that doesnt stop us innovating with mobile!

Re: Cell Phone Software: The Billion-Dollar Sand Trap

#20

Post by lupin_sansei » Fri, May 04, 2007, 2:07 AM UTC

Seems to me that Cell Phones are in the position of home computers before the PC. Each manufacturer having differing standards and specs. I wonder if this is somewhere the Java really will be WORM?