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It's not about what is possible todo, it's about replacing feature phones in developing markets. They can't effort "cheap" androids, neither iphones. And if they get the money for an "cheap" android they don't have money for the development equipment.
My old cheap feature phone had a good enough browser already.
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It's not about what is possible todo, it's about replacing feature phones in developing markets. They can't effort "cheap" androids, neither iphones. And if they get the money for an "cheap" android they don't have money for the development equipment.
My old cheap feature phone had a good enough browser already.
On the other hand, how does Facebook expect to monetize these millions of users who are living on $10/day? The number being thrown around yesterday was that Facebook paid $40/user. Bearing in mind that a good percentage of these users will never provide any ROI, it is one more reason to look like it was way overvalued.
A significant portion if the deal value is defensive, IMO. AKA: so Google or VK don't buy them and strangle off a major tentacle of user adoption and stickiness of the FB ecosystem. Facebook doesn't have to directly monetize THOSE $10/day users for this to be a smart decision. They can monetize some users directly, but not having a competitor own whatsapp is worth a lot to FB.
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That's not the case. WhatsApp barely holds any data. The user doesn't have to give over their personal details. It ties them to their mobile number & messages are stored only until they're pushed to the client. Once pushed they are then removed from WhatsApp servers.
I'm curious: how do you know that they're removed?
/s
WhatsApps is easy, simple, quick and beautiful! so the path to $16B exit is not a J2ME app but an idea to get users start communicating with minimum amount of effort and time.
Let's not forget Symbian and Blackberry either. WhatsApp also runs on those. I don't think starting a new Blackberry, Symbian or J2ME project today is really a good idea, though. It takes at least a few years for a company to make an exit, and by the time you do, those burning platforms will have flamed out.
It absolutely makes sense to work on a J2ME app today if you have a product aimed at developing nations. They won't be swimming in smartphones any time soon.
Let's not forget Symbian and Blackberry either. WhatsApp also runs on those. I don't think starting a new Blackberry, Symbian or J2ME project today is really a good idea, though. It takes at least a few years for a company to make an exit, and by the time you do, those burning platforms will have flamed out.
Yes but let's not also forget that WhatsApp is 5 years old and 5 years ago it made sense writing for those platforms.
Let's not forget Symbian and Blackberry either. WhatsApp also runs on those. I don't think starting a new Blackberry, Symbian or J2ME project today is really a good idea, though. It takes at least a few years for a company to make an exit, and by the time you do, those burning platforms will have flamed out.
keeping as much of your codebase cross platform is also a good idea. which means java and/or c++
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Ya.. that is definitely the takeaway. If you address all platforms, your market is suddenly both under served and absolutely huge.
One such "platform" is made up of the 80% of android phones that are cheap and basic with small data plans and limited access to slow wifi. The anecdotes from the 80s & 90s when annual PC sales for any given year were a substantial portion of the overall PCs in use at the time are interesting. The realization that software could be written for the newest machine and it would run everywhere soon enough is not directly…
Ignoring the fictional statistics, the cheap devices (e.g. Xiaomi) in countries like China still tend to be surprisingly powerful, and you hardly need to design down to them. And it's a rare app, beyond something like video conferencing, that puts any real burden on connectivity.
The key take away from this article is not to build your app in J2ME but to recognize how big the world is outside of America. American focused startups face lots of competition in a relatively small market.
The US is a pretty big market. 320,000,000 people, most with at least some disposable income. There are also plenty of advertisers that want to market their products to Americans, which means you can choose between ad-sponsored or for-pay business models.