app stores for all major smartphones now live!

Yesterday Microsoft announced that the Windows Marketplace for Mobile is accepting applications. This is a great opportunity for mobile developers. Combined with BlackBerry AppWorld, Android Market and Nokia Ovi Store there are now marketplaces available to facilitate distribution to users of every major smartphone. This is a great opportunity for developers. There is now a place to highlight the availability of their app, that doesn’t rely on consumers finding out about you and your app directly. Just create a great app in a category of a consumer needs and they’ll find it.

It does beg the question however: is there sufficient consumer demand on any of these one platforms (with the possible exception of iPhone) to justify writing an app for just that one platform. This is where we are seeing the most demand for the Rhodes framework: the need to create a great app that spans all smartphones that user’s may choose to carry. With Rhodes you can do this: write your app once and Rhodes allows you to instantly build native apps for each of those device operating systems and their associated “app store”. While there are a couple of other approaches to doing both iPhone and Android apps, we are not aware of any way besides Rhodes to write a single set of code and build native apps for all major smartphones: iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Symbian.

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simplified licensing

Today we announced simpler commercial license terms for our Rhodes and RhoSync products. Why did we change it? The previous license was fairly standard for embedded technology licensing: 5 percent of whatever you sell. Just a few years ago, the presence of an open source Gnu Public License alongside a commercial percentage-based license would have worked. You want to make a free app? Open source it under GPL and you owe nothing. Want to charge? Just give us a percentage.

In 2009 however this won’t work anymore. There are too many companies distributing “free apps” but who don’t want to open source them. And they intend to make money but in rather complicated ways that are difficult for anyone to really quantify. For other customers, they said “I don’t know exactly what I’m going to charge, but I need to know what I’m going to pay you regardless”. We needed a simple way to buy a commercial license for all of these customers.

So our new terms are:

- The Rhodes framework alone is $500 per application for an unlimited number of users

- The RhoSync Server (not required to be used by Rhodes applications but very commonly used) is $5000 for 100 users. It scales logarithmically with increasing users: 1000 users is $10,000. 10,000 users is $20,000.

Either license entitles customers to a year of free updates. You can use the last free update of Rhodes and RhoSync indefinitely for no further purchase. If you want to stay current, maintenance is 40% of the original price ($200 per year to stay current on Rhodes, $2000 per year to stay current on RhoSync).

Positive response to the new license is almost unanimous. We have had a handful of enterprise ISVs who were used to 5% embedded licensing who seemed to prefer that offer as it fits into the spirit of our partnership. Our whole goal is to make you, the mobile developer, as successful as possible, and share in a very small way in that success. It turned out on running the numbers that the actual pricepoints for those vendors ended up being very close to the new pricing (they were all RhoSync Server users).

For developers who want to use Rhodes only, the new license terms of $500 for a single app with unlimited users is of course a huge bargain compared to the old terms. We believe that when developers understand how much synchronized data can improve their user’s experience (and hence their sales) almost all developers of enterprise or informational applications will use RhoSync. “Rolling your own” mobile sync framework is just not a practical option (especially as you start to appreciate how we’ve taken advantage of things like iPhone and BlackBerry push to create super-optimized sync).

Anyway, for those of you that want a very inexpensive crossplatform smartphone app development framework, we’ve got a great deal for you: $500 to improve your productivity for even one device by a factor of five (multiply that by the number of device operating systems you want to support). We know that eventually you’ll want to use RhoSync as well.

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