What's the point?

Posted Mar 1, 2012 17:39 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Underpant Gnomes, repeat number 1001. You've explained very well how much profit everyone will get when B2G will replace everything. But I'm asking about item number 2: the one which goes after #1 “Collect Underpants”^W“Create B2G” and #3“Profit”^W“Celebrate the victory of web technologies”.

Yes, developers love having to write 3 or more mobile apps whenever they deploy something new. Learning 3 new and different APIs, as well as the web technologies they already know, is a breeze. It's awesome how 30% of the purchase price of their apps goes straight to Apple or Google. They can't get enough of having their apps booted from the App Store for being too similar to Apple's.

You assume:
1. Everyone knows "web technologies" (while in fact they are quite new, immature and thus knowledgeable programmers demand premium prices).
2. The only way to write cross-platform application is to use said "web technologies" (while in reality threre are many ways to build cross-platform application for different mobile platforms. SDL, Qt, other, more specialized, toolkits (like Unity 3D for games).

(Have you actually looked at Facebook's "native mobile" application? It's a thin wrapper around a web interface.)

Actually it includes quite a few native controls, but yes, this approach makes sense if you already have a webapp. But my question is about B2G: what can convince users to switch to the platform which has access to the small pile of apps when it can buy other platforms which have much larger selection.

Developers will write applications for the platform if they can sell them (directly or using embedded ads). They may not like to write half-dozen different versions (for iOS, Android, WP7, BlackBerry, Bada, etc), but they will do that if users will be there. What they will not do is to write apps which can not be sold. Well, some will decide that it's easier to just write webapp and wait till “inevitable B2G victory” will do the rest, but natural selection will eliminate these pretty fast.