Yesterday at the Mobile World Congress (formerly known as 3GSM) in Barcelona, AOL announced it will release an Open Mobile Software Platform sometime this summer. From their press release:
The new open platform will help stimulate innovation by providing developers with ready access to the tools and source code they need to build and distribute applications across all major mobile device platforms and operating systems including BREW, Java, Linux, RIM, Symbian, and Windows Mobile. As a result, developers will be able to create applications for a wide variety of mobile devices.
It may surprise many that AOL has been very active in the mobile space for sometime. In fact they were the previous owner of Tegic who pioneered the T9 text prediction software that is on most phones up until this past summer.
It is obvious that AOL is following Google’s lead by trying to use open tools for the mobile medium as a content delivery platform. The strategy is that releasing tools and software for the average developer thereby lowers the bar to publishing and therefore allows for a greater opportunity to embed AOL content and services into it.
My take: More tools in the mobile space is definitely a good thing.
That being said I don’t know why anyone would invest in mobile apps these days. I strongly feel that the Mobile Web is the future of mobile. We need to see better support for desktop web standards on more handsets so we can make more always-on web applications. The browser is the only mobile app that matters these days.
“That being said I don’t know why anyone would invest in mobile apps these days. I strongly feel that the Mobile Web is the future of mobile. We need to see better support for desktop web standards on more handsets so we can make more always-on web applications. The browser is the only mobile app that matters these days.”
Really? Do you only use web-apps on your laptop? Do you use iTunes or just stream audio over the web? How about e-mail; web based only? How about your business apps and word processor?Web based?
If not, why not?