We were just briefed by Jeff Haynie, founder of Appcelerator, regarding the progress his firm is making in introducing its mobile application developmetn platform, called Titanium. By coincidence the briefing occurred the day after Verizon Wireless’ Developer Conference, an event that generated additional uncertainty regarding where platform holds the promise for the greatest return on investment.

Besides exhibiting Orwellian overtones – whereby apps and content can be “disappeared” overnight – the current ecosystem for mobile application development and distribution is increasingly Balkanized. The mobile application marketplace is growing more and more like a crap shoot, calling for developers to place bets on which square has the highest likelihood of paying off. Assuming that the success of the iTunes App Store is replicable, RIM (the BlackBerry App World), Nokia (Ovi Store), Microsoft (Windows Marketplace for Mobile), Google and the Android community (Android Market) and the major wireless carriers – most recently exemplified by Verizon Wireless’ announced VCast App Store (coming in Q4 2009) have joined the fray.

Each of these retail partners offer different tools, support services, revenue splits and operate at varying degrees of “openness” (meaning conformance to popular standards). From our perspective, “openness” is unambiguous. It should embrace Web standards, like HTML and cascading style sheets (CSS); Javascript; well-understood application program interfaces (APIs); and ultimate adherence to the principles of open source software. That’s why we’ve been following the roll-out.

According to Haynie, Appcelerator is not trying to tackle the challenge of “miniaturizing” desktop apps.It is to make it easier to customize for the other 20% of features of functions. Right now the company is addressing the smartphone with emphasis on iPhone and Android. Blackberry is the next logical platform, but the key is to provide a set of APIs that work across 80% of the operating systems and devices.

Appcelerator has started to gain traction for Titanium Mobile among the developer community, having attracted 3,000 new developers. It doesn’t overcome the challenges posed by the fragmentation of the mobile application retailing ecosystem, but it does make it much simpler to use cloud-base resources to extend the reach of applications across desktops, smartphones and netbooks. Boston-based Everypoint is another noteworthy mobile application development platform provider. Its Nemo platform targets delivery of rich, graphics-based applications across a multiplicity of devices and carriers. In its case, the target is feature phones, creating a target market of over one billion devices.

We’ll be watching to see how the market sorts out. With Google already declaring App Stores a dying concept and Web-browsers as the ubiquitous application environment, it’s easy to observe that “the Web has won.” That’s the easy part. But the case for rich applications that take best advantage of the geolocation, graphics, animation and automated speech processing keeps building as user expectations grow more sophisticated. Appcelerator and its cohort of platform providers an approach that promotes reuse of their existing code across a multiplicity of carriers and devices and perhaps a more rational (and profitable) way for developers to reach their rightful audience.

Categories: Articles

Tags: mobile services, Recombinant Telephony, Rich Phone Apps