Question: What is the best way to get your mobile platform to be adopted by developers and subsequently end-users?

Answer: Pay off the developers

 

And that is just what Google (News - Alert) is doing with its Android software development kit (SDK). A total of $10 million dollars will be awarded to the best applications in a contest Google recently announced..

 

Having lived through the application wars of Apple (News - Alert) vs. PC and then Microsoft Windows vs. IBM OS/2 I can recall just how important it is the have the application developers behind your platform.

 

For example, in the publishing industry a popular software package for desktop publishers was Quark Express and the company was a loyal Apple developer. In the early 1990s I asked Quark company executives if they would be developing the software for use on PCs and they said “never.”

 

Of course,  the company changed direction a bit later… TMC currently uses Quark on PCs.

 

The videogame market is another area where application developers can make a big difference. A look at Halo 3 shows you just how important applications can be.

 

But in the mobile market, it is a different story at the moment. I have a mobile device and I rarely download software speech recognition applications and the Adobe Acrobat Reader. I have tried the occasional mapping application, but they haven’t proven that useful to me because I also have a Garmin GPS unit with me constantly.

 

There is no killer app in the mobile space today and I am not sure there is a dire need for one. This is exactly the reason Google has launched its contest; if the company can come up with a single killer application they could turn the entire mobile world upside down overnight.

 

Recently I discussed exactly how Google and Sprint (News - Alert) could merge, and in my article I mentioned: “I do wish someone would cross the chasm between my desires and my surroundings.”

 

Perhaps this is the area where a killer application will emerge. If a software package is able to effectively keep me up-to-date about my surroundings and match the information to my needs, I will be forever grateful.

 

For example, I may be a huge coffee fan but hate Starbucks. It would be beyond annoying to have to search for a coffee shop every few minutes on my mobile device. Instead, I would prefer to be alerted when a popular non-Starbucks coffee shop is nearby. This is the area where application developers could provide the glue to make my life easier.

 

It is worth noting that Apples’s iPhone (News - Alert) has an incredible browser embedded in it and, as such, from a graphical perspective it will be tough to beat this device. I mention this because any application which can be developed on Android can effectively be ported to iPhone using the software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) model.

 

It could be that the killer app for Google’s Android won’t not be anything superior to what can currently be provided for iPhone users; after all, most SaaS applications which aren’t even designed for iPhone run on it effectively already.

 

Where the iPhone comes up short is software architecture allowing SaaS applications to run when there is no Internet connectivity. This is where Google Gears comes into play because it allows SaaS applications to run with no Web access. (By the way, Android is based on Java but is even more open, giving developers more granular control.)

 

Google has a new approach to mobile device programming platforms and has shaken things up quite a bit. Developers seem interested in creating new applications for Android. It remains to be seen if the true killer mobile application is around the corner.