mobile enterprise apps continue to be brightspot in the technology industry

As reported by InfoWorld and many others, Evans Data just announced their survey of 400 commercial app developers which shows that “94 percent of corporate developers expect development of wireless enterprise applications to either increase or stay the same in the coming year”. And this is all against the backdrop of the stunning complexity and fragmentation that mobile app development is subject to without a framework like Rhodes. One of the most interesting points of the article is how much things are moving to a more diverse and fragmented set of device operating systems:

Market adoption of Windows Mobile remained flat, with 33 percent targeting it as opposed to 31 percent in the mid-2008 survey. Apple’s iPhone jumped in the survey from 8 percent eyeing it six months ago to 20 percent in the new survey…Google’s Android rose to 18 percent in the new survey after registering with 7.5 percent of developers in the last survey.

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the utter death of the “mobile web”

At Rhomobile we are obviously believers that the way to interact with enterprise app data is with synced local data. Just like nobody does their email over a mobile browser, neither does anyone work with their business applications over a mobile browser: its all about local apps for either email or business apps. But at one time I thought for just reading information (browsing the New York Times, looking up topics on Wikipedia) good browsers like Safari on the iPhone were pretty good. I read news every morning on my iPhone. But a recent app puts that theory to shame. Hampton Catlin’s Wiki Mobile app, that was recently garnering over a thousand downloads a day, shows that even though read only browsing of content on smartphone browsers is pretty good, its not quite as good as a dedicated local app built for a specific site or content.

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The Upcoming 1.0 Release – What’s In A Number?

Many people have asked us “how come your product is not numbered 1.0 or greater?”. Or “does the fact that its not numbered 1.0 or greater mean that it’s buggy?”. The answer is that the early 0.x releases just indicate a subset of our initial planned functionality. Certainly there are issues with the software outstanding. But the numbering scheme just means successive monthly releases until we get to our initially envisioned functionality. We’re fairly transparent with our featureset and we expect that the early features will be quite useful to a number of people.

That said, what does it take to bump the numbering schema to 1.0 and what is in the 1.0 release? We anticipate the following three major items for our 1.0 release:

• support for Android – we did this last because there aren’t a lot of Android devices in the enterprise right now. But its still very important to us, and work is underway on it right now (as those of you who watch our Github checkins can tell)
• robust device capabilities – we have GPS and PIM contact integration today. We don’t think that is enough to demonstrate the range of capabilities that are interesting. We will be adding support for camera and SMS in 1.0
• third party applications – we have several developers who are using Rhodes who we anticipate releasing before our 1.0 release. We have no idea whether they will be “published on the iPhone AppStore” because AppStore approval takes an indeterminate amount of time. But the apps should be publicly available on other platforms by then.

We are planning 1.0 for the end of February. We will have one point release, 0.3, ahead of then with several requested features before then. Stay tuned to our Documentation page for more details as 1.0 approaches.

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The Mobile Application Development Challenge

Today we announced our Rhodes app building contest, the Mobile Application Development Challenge: $10000 for the best mobile app! We are excited about unleashing the creativity of mobile developers and seeing the great things that they can build with Rhodes. While we have several commercial developers using our product now, we want more sample apps available as open source (beyond our own). The contest requires that developers open source their app and make it available on Github. We’re looking forward to seeing lots of examples posted over the next several months.

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Palm Pre announced.

The Palm Pre was finally formally announced today. It looks like a great device: the power of the touchscreen iPhone with a slideout keyboard. It will also be interesting to see just how Nova builds on Linux and diverges from LiMo. If the device is nearly as good as it looks, it’s very likely that Rhomobile will support it close to its release timeframe at the end of the first half.

What’s clear is the mobile device operating system diversity is here to stay. I love the CNet quote

Palm’s a little late to the Smartphone 2.0 game, but it got off to a good start with the Palm Pre roll out. Obviously, it will take much more than a flashy demo to get Palm back on track. How the company handles application development will loom large in its success or failure.

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Rhodes 0.2 Released!

Hard on the heels of last month’s 0.1 release, today we are announcing the 0.2 release of Rhodes, our framework for building mobile applications. The big new features in release 0.2 is Symbian support. With all the press about iPhone and Android, Symbian is still the world leader in installed based of devices. I love using Rhodes-based apps on my beloved Nokia N95. We’ve also expanded our device capabilities exposed including the ability to access PIM contact information from the phone.

We also have build scripts for all of our supported platforms, and a much better build process overall. See our tutorial for more details on how to build for iPhone, Windows Mobile, RIM and Symbian. We also now precompile our Ruby source for applications so they load and run much faster.

We have also updated our RhoSync server product to release 0.2. Our synchronization is now much faster with incremental updates sent to the device. We also now require authenticated user access to get to the data. We have an easier way of managing large groups of sync source objects. Now “sources” are grouped into “apps” that contain groups of sources. As an administrator, you will see only the apps that you have created and their sources. This is a key feature for our “hosted services” release coming next month in release 0.3.

Release 0.2 provides a much better experience for developers:
- more platforms and devices supported (with Symbian)
- much faster user experience (with incremental sync and Ruby code precompilation)
- much easier to do ongoing development (with build scripts for all platforms)

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a six horse race: Palm to debut Nova on Thursday

According to Crunchgear Palm will unveil their new smartphone OS and device, codenamed Nova, on Thursday at the Consumer Electronics show. It will be a touchscreen device with a slideout keyboard, but one that is portrait oriented. Device diversity in both form factor and platform continues apace. As others have pointed out, smartphone industry is now a six horse race. The need for some crossplatform mobile framework is now only stronger.

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eWeek’s Top 10 Application Development Stories of 2008

We really enjoyed eWeek’s Daryl Taft’s top 10 application development stories of 2008, particularly item 3:

3. Mobile app development gets huge

Android, Windows Mobile, iPhone, BlackBerry, Symbian, name your platform. Mobile app development is where the action is. The next step is making it easier to build apps that run on more than one platform.

Also, 4. Dynamic Languages Take Off (go Ruby!), and, with Rhomobile’s forthcoming hosted services for mobile app development: 8. Planting the Seeds of Development as a Service.

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