iOS Archives - Page 3 of 7 - Reality is a Game

In preparation for my talk tomorrow night at the MDOT event, I looked at some mobile related notes I haven’t put on here related to alternative mobile operating systems (OS).

Apple and Google have corned the market on mobiles thanks to their early leap into it and the creation of the App Store. Their success came at the expense of previous mobile phone makers and inspired an entire new market of apps. In order to get into the mobile market to the extent they have is a near impossibility (for now) but that hasn’t stopped people from trying.

Tizen

First up there is Tizen which is yet another attempt at creating a fully open source mobile OS to compete against Android (which is less like open source every release) and Apple.

Tizen to me looks very developer focused and personally I don’t find it all that inspiring. Still, I hope that they get some traction so we can see some nifty innovations. They have some big industry players like Intel supporting them.

Tizen is an open source, standards-based software platform supported by leading mobile operators, device manufacturers, and silicon suppliers for multiple device categories, including smartphones, tablets, netbooks, in-vehicle infotainment devices, smart TVs, and more. Tizen offers an innovative operating system, applications, and a user experience that consumers can take from device to device.

Here’s a video going into some details around Tizen:

Jolla

Jolla is young company that has already created a new OS called Sailfish that I do find inspiring. They are taking a very design-centric approach to the OS and really thinking about what the user wants and what the user does.

Mashable recently covered Sailfish and they have a good summation of why Sailfish matters”

Sailfish is designed to acknowledge that most people use their phones for several things at once these days. The phone’s home screen can be filled with up to 9 concurrently running applications. (Contrast that with an iPhone, where, save for things like playing music, applications are paused when a user switches from one to another.) And they can all be controlled without even “opening” them. Rather, each “application cover— which is a large rectangle on the phone’s home screen — has its own interface.

Mashable also points out their strategy of breaking into the mobile market is to go into China first where the competition between carriers operates differently.

Here’s a presentation on their Sailfish OS, you’ll want to fast forward to like the 8 minute mark:

App Promo surveyed iOS developers and got some interesting results. The most staggering number from the survey is that 60% of apps don’t generate enough revenue to break even. Take a look (click to enlarge):

The key thing to note for aspiring developers is the importance of marketing an iOS app. Without promotional support for your app don’t expect anything close to success and don’t think you can rely on using free social media either.

As with most tech news, Ars has a good analysis of App Promo’s research with interviews with some developers. They look at the difficulty of even getting an app discovered (this is an ongoing problem with the App Store and Apple knows it) to the costs of developing the app and where the money can be made making iOS apps.

“Development costs are generally much higher than folks realize,” Kafasis said. “Making an app still requires tens of thousands of dollars in development, if not hundreds of thousands. Recouping that kind of money 99 cents—or really, 70 cents—at a time is not easy.”
Part of the problem can be attributed to consumer expectations. Whereas $20-30 was not an uncommon price for desktop software created by small developers in the past, the App Store quickly led consumers to expect to pay 99 cents, or maybe $1.99 for most mobile apps. Many more are free, supported with in-app ads or “freemium” in-app purchases.
“Paid apps, despite likely being only $1, is a surprisingly high barrier of entry,” McCarron told Ars