I've hit a real big junction at the moment. It's a whacking great T junction of a decision that I have to make. It all boils down to mobile apps. With OpenCoffeeDerry approaching this Thursday I'm giving lots of ideas a lot of thought. I missed BarcampBelfast yesterday, but I was recovering from photographing a wedding the day before. Anyway, I digress....
One of the reasons that the iPhone and iPod Touch work so well isn't really down to the hardware, it's down to Apple's way of working in terms of the App Store. You can to sell on the App Store then you have to register as a developer (at $99) then write your app and get it approved. So there's already a level of commitment to producing a good app. If it ain't good it don't get in (you on the guest list, sir?).
Over to J2ME.... hmm I'm struggling with this one. If I look at something like Getjar.com there's a lack of clear layout, that's more to design than anything else. My next problem is finding what I want and for my device... urgh this is getting messy. Give me the App Store for J2ME PLEASE!
More to the point, are there actually any really good I-can't-live-without-this apps in J2ME for mobile devices?
Sounds like I'm talking myself out of this one.
On the opposite side of the coin: first of all buy either an iPhone or iPod Touch (which is going to cost me anything from £165 - £350 depending on what I get), learn Objective C, get a Mac so I can get the SDK (call that another £800), the economics are starting to work against me. So for my £1100 I need to make sure that I'm going to get enough downloads and marketing clout so the downloads happen.
Perhaps I should just build a good J2ME App Store.
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Hard question. Even with good design, do many people running J2ME capable phones actually download apps? Someone quoted recently that the average iPhone user downloads 30 apps (I've downloaded 115 so I'm growing that number a little).
Then it was announced that the users of other mobiles download an average of 0 apps (I presume they mean, the number was so small it was less than 0.5 apps per user)
Obviously with me holding http://devdays.info on Thursday and Friday this week, I'm going to be biased but I just don't know if the size of the market is any way representative of the people who will spend money. Antony Hutton of eyeSpyFX, a Derry-based company, says his revenue from supporting iPhone is 4 times that of the other 15 mobile phones he supports with Java platforms.
Of course, it creates a self-perpetuating myth if developers flock to the iPhone because other people start making money.
There's a heap of stuff happening at the moment, not least a InvestNI-sponsored trip to WWDC. So if you were considering iPhone, there's never been a better day to try it.
MJ, thanks for taking the time to respond. My focus has actually shifted from the apps themselves to the mechanism that delivers them. That's where Apple really scores, big vendor lock in.
I do download J2ME apps, but I do have to go hunting for what I want. It's back to the signal to noise ratio.
If Antony is at OpenCoffeeDerry this week then I'm sure I'll have a chat with him about this.
As for InvestNI...... all you have to do is read www.thisislimavady.co.uk to see what I think :)
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