Mobile Platform Market Shares
Thinking about starting a new mobile project? Anders Lindh of Flyer One Ltd has put together a useful list of programmable platforms and their market shares.
Market share is just one factor. Other things to consider include…
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Will the platform support what you want to do?
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How easy will it be to test for the various phone types for a particular platform?
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Routes to market for each software platform
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The ‘look and feel’ provided by each platform vs that provided natively in the phone
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Ways/ease of getting the each software type onto the phone
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How easy each platform is to develop for
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Signing/Certification requirements of each platform
In practice, these factors often conspire to make all of the platforms less than optimal. As the comments on Anders blog hint, developers are increasingly going for the lowest common denominator - SMS or Mobile Web based applications - so as to avoid many of the problems.
