Native mobile apps and enterprise apps

I want to comment on and link a couple of recent articles and industry trends. First of all the news that iPhone owners have downloaded 300 million copies of apps from the App Store, and 100 million in the last six weeks. That’s just an incredible figure. It certainly puts the kibosh on the theory that everything is moving to the mobile web. The iPhone is the world’s best mobile browser, and yet users clearly want native, local apps on their device. And the logic of having a local application is magnified even more in the enterprise application scenario where access to offline data is so critical (this is not really a consideration for most consumer apps).

The second article discusses approaches to delivering CRM application functionality via mobile devices. The article quotes executives from SalesForce, Oracle and SugarCRM on their plans to make their software available via wireless devices. There was a spectrum of answers ranging from emphasizing just the mobile web to advocating a hybrid approach. One quite that I liked from David Trice at Oracle:

We see a hybrid approach as offering significant user value,” says Trice. “Critical features that are commonly accessed by users must be always available through the use of native applications. Supporting information and additional capabilities can be offered through browsers.

Now the problem I have is that as open source advocates, we of course use SugarCRM to run our business. Right now SugarCRM’s native mobile solution is a third party proprietary one called MobileEdge from iEnterprises. I like MobileEdge but its only available for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile (and won’t run on my HTC Fuze) and the functionality is a bit minimalist. By our contrast our SugarCRM sample app runs on every mobile device (four operating systems today and on Android in 1.0) and we didn’t have to do much to make that happen (we wrote the app once). Will native mobile apps be able to keep up with platform diversity (aka fragmentation) without a solution like Rhomobile?

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News from the Symbian Partner Event: AT&T “moving to single phone OS?” Bet not.

It always amuses me how technical news can be oversimplified to the point of absurdity. PCWorld had the headline AT&T Hopes for Single Phone OS. Of course this is probably sillier than hoping for world peace or a repeal of death and taxes. And AT&T is probably the most diverse carrier in the US for smartphone operating systems and will most likely remain that way for some time.

We’re actually big AT&T fans, visiting our local store weekly and buying cool new smartphone devices. So we’re interested in this topic in a visceral way and we listened to Roger Smith’s talk pretty closely. What Roger actually said was that Java for their branded phones was pretty much a failure (I couldn’t agree more) and that they hoped that their own branded phones could move to one OS. He hinted that maybe that would be Symbian. So here’s our predictions on the topic:
* one year from now your local AT&T store will carry the five major smartphone operating systems (which happen to the be ones we support)
* their branded phones will still include Windows Mobile and they will NOT have moved to only Symbian branded phones

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Symbian Partner Event

I just got back from the Symbian Partner Event at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Some interesting talks to comment on.

My favorite was Oren Levine’s discussion of open platforms for mobility (no surprise I guess that I liked this one). Oren spent a lot of time discussing the Web Runtime. This technology allows developers to write applications for Series 60 devices using standard web technologies: HTML, CSS, and Javascript with their extensions for device capabilities. If this sounds like a validation of the Rhomobile approach of providing a very web-like framework for writing native mobile applications, I would agree. The key thing is that Rhomobile’s Rhodes framework lets you do this for all device operating systems.

I also watched a very interesting presentation on symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) which Symbian is adding to the operating system. Very interesting from a computer science perspective. But is it really a great place to put their development resources. One attendee asked the question “what applications do you have in mind for this” (mind you this was to the product manager Jason Parker who this question should have been deadone for). There was a pause of about ten seconds until Jason said “well probably web browsing and face or speech recognition, but we really don’t know”. I get that the full applications of such a step forward may take a while to emerge. I do think they should have more concrete app ideas that are grounding the tradeoffs that they make here.

One of the more amusing sights of the conference was that, although plenty of people were carrying Nokia N95s (including myself), almost everyone had an iPhone as well.

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A shot at a single mobile device: the Nokia N97

I carry the iPhone, G1, Nokia N95, HTC Fuze and Blackberry Bold in my backpack for regular usage and testing of applications and our platform on multiple device operating systems. But I’ve settled on just the HTC Fuze and iPhone for carrying around in a given location.

Nothing beats the browser and large screen of the iPhone of course. And the selection of applications now available for the iPhone is of course unmatched.

The HTC Fuze is great small-sized Qwerty keyboard email device that works well as a voicephone (better than the very similar G1 for either in my opinion). Why not just the iPhone? If you’re emailing all day the soft keyboard doesn’t cut it. Plus the two megapixel camera is a bit dated. And I find the voice quality and it’s utility as just a phone to be not spectacular. The “two primary device” phenomenon is not unique to me. It seems to be the rule in Silicon Valley.

But there’s a newly announced device that I think stands a good shot at being my, and perhaps many other people’s, single mobile device. Its the forthcoming Nokia N97. It features a big (3.5″) screen, 640×340 resolution and a Qwerty keyboard. Plus like the Nokia 95 it has GPS capability and its smaller than the N95.

The bigscreen and high resolution may enable it to supercede carrying around an iPhone for browsing. The big wildcard of course is how many applications will be available for it running Symbian. I’m hoping that something like our platform that allows developers to build great native Symbian apps, while at the same time targeting other device operating systems, can enable this and other more advanced devices to compete with the iPhone as a showcase for a diversity of exciting applications.

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0.1 of Rhodes out, 0.2 release coming

As was announced last week, the 0.1 release of the Rhodes mobile application development work was released last week. It has support for iPhone, Windows Mobile and RIM Blackberry device operating systems. It supports access to native device capabilities with Ruby libraries for access to geolocation information. It ships with a sample application for mobile access to SugarCRM. See the Rhodes spec for more details

The 0.2 release will be out in early January. It adds the following features across all devices:
* a better build process allowing you to build and maintain your applications separately from the Rhodes framework
* incremental sync for RhoSync for much better sync performance
* settable sync sources in interface (so that the user can change the location of what sync server is being used)
* access to PIM information on the local device

The following device operating system specific features are planned:
* Symbian support
* faster load on Windows Mobile
* better UI on Windows Mobile and RIM

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