As a mobile developer working multi-platform, I get to feel mobile application development trends. Politicians spoke of a peace dividend where economic benefits came about due to peace. Well, I think there has also been an iPhone dividend.

The first wave came when the iPhone first shipped in 2007. Only web apps were possible and I received a wave of enquiries from companies and individuals, mainly outside mobile, who had been inspired by the iPhone, realised their invention wasn’t possible on iPhone and wanted to try on other platforms such as Java ME, Windows Mobile, Symbian and BlackBerry.

Over time, the iPhone became more capable, adding application development and more recently the push notification API (as a replacement for background applications). I previously posted about the need for long running applications and the types of application (monitoring events on the phone) that still aren’t possible via push notification. In fact, the push notification (from your server to Apple’s server and then to your phone) isn’t that useful because it’s a notification the user must agree to before the application is run (unless it happens to already be running which is unlikely). Applications that need to silently process notifications in background aren’t possible. Hence, I still get a few enquiries for iPhone applications that turn out to be impossible or severely restricted due to Apple’s policies.

Anyway, I think we are now on a second wave of iPhone dividend. I am getting a wave of enquiries from people who have implemented their first mobile application on iPhone and now want to port to other platforms. Most of these applications have gained many users on the iPhone but there’s a realisation that if they want to reach a much wider market then they will have to consider other platforms as well.

Related Articles:

• iPhone Form Factors
• What is Push?
• iPhone Runtimes and Interpreters
• iPhone App Store Top Applications
• Supporting a Large Market
• $1 iPhone Applications
• iPhone App Gold Rush Over So Soon?
• iPhone Developer Shortage
• Mobile Application Renaissance
• iPhone 3G Instability
• iPhone Application Gold Rush
• iPhone OS vs. other mobile platforms
• iPhone 3G Impressions and Development
• Apple WDC2008
• Own the Solution?
• iPhone Long Running Applications
• iPhone SDK - Initial Impressions
• Why is 3rd Party iPhone Software Development Possible?
• Java's not worth building in?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 7:37 am and is filed under Mobile, iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.