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The 21st century mobile application


By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
September 15, 2008 — 
A few years ago, we knew exactly what the future of mobile computing software development would be like. It would be powered by WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), a set of specifications designed to provide low-speed wireless devices with limited screen space, with a means to access information and to communicate and interact with Web services via WAP gateways that bridged the gap between telephony networks and the Internet.

We were so naïve.

Today, with 3G, 802.11g/n and Mobile WiMax (IEEE 802.16e) wireless networks, mobile devices have access to TCP/IP network speeds above 100Mb/sec. The devices of 2008 are as powerful as the PCs of only a few years ago.

Apple's iPhone, for example, has a 620MHz ARM processor with 128MB RAM and up to 16GB of flash memory running Apple Mac OS X. As John Sullivan, manager of operations for the Free Software Foundation, said of Apple's closed development system, “The iPhone is not a 'phone' any more than my laptop computer is a phone. The iPhone can make phone calls, but so can my laptop. I could call your phone using my voice-over-IP system, and you wouldn't know the difference. I can even put a card in my laptop that enables communication over a cellular network.”

The same is true of other mobile devices. While they're not quite the same things as PCs, many of them have all the power of a computer from a few years ago. Other devices—such as Nokia's N810 Internet Tablet and Intel Atom-powered netbooks like the Asus EEE 901, MSI Wind NB U100 and Acer Aspire One—completely blur the difference between PCs and mobile devices.

This is not a small matter. According to Juniper Research, "The global market for Mobile Web 2.0 will be worth US$22.4 billion in 2013, up from $5.5 billion currently."

What's a developer to do?

Many are convinced that the time for WAP or specialized runtimes is over. Instead, they see WebKit—the open-source browser engine used by Apple, Google and Nokia, among others—as tomorrow's platform for mobile development. In fact, Ben Smith, founder of WMP Systems, a small mobile application development company, said that he's “betting the company” on it.

“My company makes two business products,” Smith said. “In both cases, we have created a mobile version for WebKit-based browsers. We call it the iPhone-optimized version, but it's designed for a screen resolution, not a device, so it will work perfectly when [Google] Android comes out. WebKit is the advanced mobile platform. Opera keeps saying they are going to release a version of Opera Mobile that competes, but it keeps getting pushed into the future.”

Andrew Finkle, principal at software consultancy afpr.com, put it more bluntly. “WAP is dead. The iPhone and Skyfire browser are the first death blow.”

Finkle believes “the change in focus is a result of a confluence of factors: high-speed access to the Web, the next-generation smart phones, GPS and longer battery life.”

The shift, Finkle expects, “will affect mobile carriers’ revenue models, as more and more content and services are able to take place off-deck; they will not control it. The result will be more carriers making more of their revenue from data [transmission].”

Stephen O'Grady, co-founder of analysis firm RedMonk, also sees the future belonging to the traditional desktop browser moved to a mobile device. “At least in the near term, the future of mobile development is probably pure Web along with runtimes," he said. "The WebKit experience on the iPhone has triggered a great deal of competition, particularly within Mozilla, and we'll likely see the iPhone Web experience become more the rule than the exception. But we'll also see rich clients exploit specialized handset functionality such as GPS, gyroscopes and the like.”

The vastly improved hardware and network throughput are not the primary drivers of this sea change. “The biggest jolt to the mobile Web development experience, in my view, has been the iPhone. Its implementation of mobile Safari, while imperfect, has given handsets the real Internet, rather than a hobbled, niched version that was typical in devices that preceded it.”

What that means for the future, according to O'Grady, is that the mobile application space “will mirror the development on the client, honestly. It will evolve into a platform barely distinguishable, in many respects, from the traditional desktop browser experience.”

The World Wide Web Consortium certainly sees it that way. In late July, the organization's Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group published the first draft of guidelines, “Mobile Web Applications Best Practices,” for mobile Web application developers.

"Mobile Web content developers now have stable guidelines and maturing tools to help them create a better mobile Web experience," Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, W3C mobile Web activity lead, said in a statement. "In support of the W3C mission of building 'One Web,' we want to support the developer community by providing tools to enable a great mobile Web user experience."

Besides a preliminary list of best practices on how to handle such matters as recommending push over pull for data transmissions and how to handle user personalization information, the W3C is recommending XHTML as a “preferred format specification.” According to the W3C best practices group, this marks “full convergence in mobile markup languages, including those developed by the OMA (Open Mobile Alliance).”

Bill Hughes, principal analyst for In-Stat's wireless research group, isn't as bullish as the others are about the switchover to Web-based applications for mobile devices. “The approach to mobile development is a strategic issue that is only partially affected by the available technology. The platform, whether to use a browser or to use an application development platform, is an issue that affects both the development effort as well as the marketing of the application.

“A company cannot consider one issue in isolation of the other. By that, I mean that it may be expedient to develop for use on a Web browser. However, my research shows that mobile device users have only recently started using the Web on their phones, even though the capability has been there for years if you knew where to look.

“An optimist might say that all it will take is a really good reason, and users will flock to, say, using their Web browser. Perhaps, but the leading 'killer' mobile application that we have seen so far, wireless e-mail, has been resident on the device. The advantage of a phone application is that there is mechanism for users to get the application in a way that they are comfortable using.”

Another factor weighing against a standards-based, Web-centric approach to applications is that the mobile companies have invested heavily in those proprietary software platforms. Their financial models are often tied to specific packages with a wide variety of user features and restrictions.

“Going forward," Hughes said, “I make predictions based upon past usage behavior and technology trends that have relevant analogies to the future of mobile devices. With that context, I see growth in both environments: the browser and the mobile application environment. However, I am more optimistic about the growth potential for application on the mobile environment because there is the added support to promote these applications.”

After all, Hughes pointed out, “The Apple App Store is not the first source for applications, but they have the most awareness. While they also promote Web applications, my expectation is that downloaded applications are more comfortable for most users today.”

At the same time, though, Apple's iPhone's use of the WebKit browser has demonstrated that users don't need to be tied to a mobile vendor's specific WAP-based view of the Web. For example, with the iPhone, any mainstream (not tied to Internet Explorer 6) online banking site is now usable.

WebKit also enjoys broad corporate and developer support. For example, WebKit is already supported in Google's Linux-based Android, Mac OS X, Symbian OS and Trolltech's Qt, and on higher levels, by the GNOME (GNU Object Model Environment) Linux desktop environment and the Opera browser. Any application written toward a WebKit browser with XHTML should render almost as easily on a mobile device as it does on a PC.

That, in turn, enormously reduces the cost for mobile software developers in terms of both time and money. Instead of dealing with the complexities of multiple hardware architectures, firmware types and mobile operator restrictions, they can focus on straight-forward Web development problems.

Jonathan Younie, a software engineer for hedge fund Ramsey Quantitative Systems, believes in the more Web-friendly software development environment. “WAP was a stopgap that allowed Internet-like functionality and availability of information to a class of phones that couldn't download data faster than a 2,400-baud modem.”

Today, Younie said, “The European and Asian markets are ahead of the United States as far as the use of mobile technology goes, but we're starting to catch up. The Apple iPhone is far from revolutionary other than its excellent implementation of a capacitive touch screen. Companies like HTC [the Taiwanese OEM behind many popular mobile phone brands] are leading the way in developing products that are fully capable mobile workplaces. They integrate functionality like dual cameras for mobile videoconferencing  and office productivity applications.”

Of course, “Due to the current cost of such high-productivity devices, they're only really available to the business professional that needs and can afford the technology,” Younie added. “This does not create an exceptionally large market for these products, considering that the generation of businesspeople who can afford these items is not as mobile-inclined  as the younger generation.”

It's not going to stay that way. “As new technology for high-speed Internet and high-powered mobile processing emerges and a generation of mobile-minded businesspeople enters the workforce,” Younie said, expect to see ”high-capacity mobile workstations—phones with the capabilities of office functionality, constant Internet connection, and full voice and video communications, with the integration of technologies like voice over IP, all at a reasonable cost. Currently, functionality like this is available but only at great expense. Most office functionality is available but is limited to the processing capacity of the phone. As those processors and memory catch up to the strength of modern laptops, look for it to be available to a much wider generation of mobile professionals.”

That’s not all. Younie also wants “exceptionally advanced mobile entertainment systems. The mobile market is moving toward consolidation. We have a lot of mobile functionality, but it requires too many devices. Mobile video processing technology is also limited and quite costly. We have portable DVD players, glossy cell phones, portable gaming systems, digital cameras and MP3/digital video players. Look for consolidation of these systems to hit the market in mass appeal to a younger generation. Granted, we have some pieces combined—cell phones with cameras/MP3 players, etc.—but these are mostly limited in capacity, especially the camera technology, and it's rare that anyone would replace a dedicated device with a phone version. The future will be different.”

The future will indeed be different. Still, it seems too early to rule out device-based applications. The Linux-based Android and LiMo Foundation devices certainly offer open platforms for the already large Linux development circles. In addition, Nokia's decision to make Symbian open source has attracted a lot of programmer attention.

That said, with WebKit on one side and the W3C offering standardization on the other, WAP would seem to be on its last legs. It won't be missed.

Tomorrow belongs to Web-based applications and Symbian- or Linux-based prediction. Let’s hope this prophecy turns out better than the one about WAP.


Related Search Term(s): mobile development, networking, Apple, Google


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