Why is the mobile platform not being innovated on as heavily as the web? It's been bothering Ewan MacLeod over at SMSTextNews - and when I say bothered I mean full on ranting on the mobile scene, VC's, entrepreneurs and networks and the consistently closed world. Well worth reading this one over a nice cup of coffee and a digestive biscuit.
Read on in the full article.
His article is spot on, unfortunately. I can comment only from an s60 user's point of view but it is disheartening just to think about how many symbian applications I have tried and how many of them I have stopped using for reasons completely out of the developers' control. I just checked: out of the literally hundreds of application I have installed on my phones in the last 4-5 years I have valued as useful by actually wanting to use them on a regular basis only 7. that is from someone who is desperately trying to make use of his E90 in every sensible way.
Part of the reason for that though is the massive amount of bundled software which users expect to see come with a mobile device. If the built-in stuff is good enough, there isn't much incentive to go to the trouble of installing third party stuff.
Another thing is the web, as services move online the whole world of offline applications is starting to disappear. It's already possible to get a lot of functionality from a computer without using anything except the browser.