The Venture Capital Dispatch of the Wall street Journal has an article reporting on the recent Dow Jones’ Wireless Innovations Conference.

The issue they are reporting on is one of whether developers should build an application for one or two mobile platforms or should they support multiple and maybe all operating systems. If you read the article you will realise there was no consensus of opinion.

While I don’t think there is an answer to this question, it’s possible for me to look back at projects I have worked on over the last few years. In almost all cases, companies have decided to go the multi-platform route. I think this is for the following reasons…

• To not rely on one platform but spread their bets
• Some started with one platform but grew sideways once the end customer (usually network operators or phone OEMs) asked for better platform support
• Some of the applications where mobile social and the more users the better
• Some additionally implemented on iPhone (and are now implementing on Android) so that they are ‘the first’

Having said this, we are entering a time where there’s sufficient sales of individual platforms to justify developing just for one. For example, there have been more S60 phone sold than Macs. Obviously there are also other considerations. For example, it’s currently not as easy to discover, buy and install S60 software as it is on the Mac.

As with most conundrums, the answer is ‘It all depends…’. It depends on the type of application, as well as how, when and who you are going to sell it to.

Related Articles:

• Steep Future Smartphone Market Share Gains
• Success Factor: Don't Depend On One Market
• Device Fragmentation Across Platforms
• On Which Platforms are People Seeking to Develop?
• Platform Development Comparisons
• How Many Mobile Platforms?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 4:13 pm and is filed under Mobile, Phones. Both comments and pings are currently closed.