Comments on: On Mobile Applications, Platforms and Monetization — “Show me the Money”

By: McGuire’s Law » Blog Archive » Observations: Applications - May 5, 2009

Tue, 05 May 2009 22:25:17 +0000

[...] On Mobile Applications, Platforms and “Show me the Money” [...]

By: Jerome Veliot

Jerome Veliot — Sat, 02 May 2009 06:10:20 +0000

Thanks a lot for this answer

By: Bruce

Bruce — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:25:31 +0000

ceo,

thanks for summarizing this Forox thread. It’s been a real good one, and has been covering so much ground too. It’s real good to see it all coming together here. Now I can delete those emails.

By: ceo

ceo — Fri, 01 May 2009 13:37:33 +0000

@Jerome -

MIDP3 should be out this year; (slow) progress have been happening in the background. MIDP3 is has many new parts. The process is slow. I say “hope” because there are so many things that can affect its public release and adoption (such as Oracle acquisition) — yet to be seen is which vendor is implementing it, but all vendors that has supported J2ME should be adopting it… The spec lead recently left Motorola. I’ve no idea what will happen if Motorola (who is the spec lead for MIDP) decides to drop J2ME support — remember, Motorola committed to Android.

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 01 May 2009 09:19:56 +0000

“AJAX will replace both J2ME and XHTML as the preferred platform for mobile applications development”

Urgh, never understood this quote and it always annoys me that it’s *still* so widely referenced as valid analysis. Leaving the J2ME aspect aside it makes no technical sense what-so-ever to say that Ajax will replace XHTML! That’s like saying butter will replace bread.

By: Jerome Veliot

Jerome Veliot — Fri, 01 May 2009 04:54:32 +0000

As a member of the JCP expert group for JSR271 (MIDP3) : don’t you have some information on the current schedule for MIDP 3 ? How can you only hope MIDP 3 will come out this year?
From an external point of view, jsr 271 expert group hasn’t given any sign of existence since march 2008 and it should have been released a long time ago… If MSA is cool, I believe MIDP3 is needed for the Java ME subsistence!

By: Michael Yuan

Michael Yuan — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:17 +0000

I think the notion that you need to go after the “maximum addressable market” is deeply flawed. That is what had hunted J2ME developers for years — to accommodate low end Java phones as required by carrier’s on-deck app stores. What developers want is to address the “maximum number of people who are willing to pay”. Today, it means the US iPhone market.

Also an interesting article about Papa John’s “failed iPhone experiment”. It demonstrate web versus native, and big addressable market (web) versus niche (iPhone) at the same time:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/papa_johns_says_iphone_app_is_a_dud_maybe_they_should_launch_real_one.php