21st-Century Software Development
Crowdsourcing Is the Future of Cell Phone Application Development
Anyone can write software for Google's Android and Apple's iPhone, leading to the killer apps of the future, but who will win and lose in the long run?
Apple has the iPhone. Google has Android (software that manages a cell phone). Both seek to dominate the future cell phone market by letting any developer write software which can be run on either of these phones. How will this affect the market and who are likely to be the winners and losers?
Increased computing capabilities are taking the control away from the cell phone hardware manufacturers and giving it to software companies. Apple and Google both understand this. As cell phones take on more features (including Internet access) their appeal will be dictated by the quality of their software and the applications and services that are available.
Crowdsourcing Is a Good Idea for Users
No single company can anticipate every type of application a cell phone user will find useful and the number of possible useful applications increases sharply as both cell phone capabilities and bandwidth speeds increase (compare what is available to Japanese cell phone users, compared to those in Western Europe and the US). Anyone can have a good idea, not just those working in the cell phone industry. Therefore, a good approach for Apple and Google is to access talent they do not employ by crowdsourcing cell phone application development to anyone who wants to try.
Cell phone applications will, most likely, fall into two types: phone-based applications, and network-based applications. The first kind are applications that only need the phone to run, such as a calculator or a simple calendar. Expect the crowdsourcing community to write a lot of these, all slightly different. The really interesting applications, however, will be those that interface with network-based systems, e.g., multi-player games, social networking systems and sophisticated web-search applications, providing the user with a shared, highly interactive experience.
Mobile Cloud-Computing and $100M of Investment
To write a killer-app for either phone will require access to back-end compute power where the application intelligence will be stored. Google has such a back-end in its cloud computing system, the out-of-sight operation that provides its web search and other online services. Google can leverage this to provide programmers with services that aren't available on a cell phone such as backed-up storage and network access to other cell phone users and web services (such as Gmail and Twitter). Apple may provide a similar back-end environment that could provide programmers with access to iTunes, and the $100M iPhone investment fund from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins will certainly focus minds.
This points up the difference in the two approaches. Apple are, as ever, providing a proprietary hardware and software platform, plus quality assurance for all applications written for the iPhone. Apple make money from sales of the phone hardware, a share of the phone company's phone rental as well as driving traffic to its online services, such as iTunes. Google may also make some money from phone rental, but their major source of income will be from selling advertising to companies for display on the phone. In order to do this effectively, Google has to leverage their cloud computing environment and so must give the crowd access to it.
Could the iPhone and Android Kill the iPod and Wifi?
Will the iPhone kill the iPod? As the price of the iPhone decreases it will become increasingly available to the average user. Once that happens, why buy an iPod when there is a better product that does more?
If Android really takes off, will it help to kill wifi? Although the available bandwidth is different, users may prefer the always-accessible nature of the phone network and the phone's applications over the patchy connectivity of wifi, especially when on the move.
iPhone: The OLPC Of Cell Phones?
And what of providing the iPhone and Android in emerging markets? Phone ownership in the US and Western Europe is already saturated. India, China, Africa and South America are the markets of the future where real growth can be found. Google could provide a cut-down version of Android for the types of phone used in these markets. And Apple has an opportunity to do for cell phones what the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program has done for laptops.
Brilliant Applications For Everyone
Crowdsourcing the cell phone market is going to bring brilliant applications to the mobile masses. It will take time, but it will happen. Users will win, as will the companies providing the software and services. If Android becomes the Windows of the mobile world, one loser will be Microsoft. Market power is shifting, away from companies who have traditionally held control over the cell phone's hardware and its proprietary operating system (Nokia) towards companies providing open operating systems and Internet-capable software services.
Open-source platforms will give Apple and Google, as well as the community of developers, much more influence in the cell phone market. It's only a matter of time before a major shift in power takes place.
