Mobile Evolution - Thoughts, insight, and experiences related to the mobile software industry

Which is trickier--coming up with a good idea or 'porting it cross-platforms? Does your company have a long list of ideas, or the skill set to develop across platforms, or both? Recently I read an article about the iPhone becoming more difficult to develop for, due to fragmentation. Besides other things (volume, the AppStore....), the iPhone has been attractive to develop for because it does not require many iterations or multiple phones.

Today we announced at Creative Algorithms that our Palm OS apps, Trip Boss and Date Wheel, have been "Classic Certified" for the MotionApps emulator app "Classic" for the webOS on the Palm Pre. (full press release here). What exactly does this mean?

If you are not signed up as an iTunes affiliate for links to your software from your website, then you are throwing an additional 5% in revenue out the door. The iTunes Affiliate program rewards you 5% for each sale through your link. The program is also makes sense for any news site who commonly links to iPhone apps. Affiliate programs should not be new to these sites, but it might be something a developer has not considered.

Just updated the Mobile Development Platforms Spreadsheet. Most of the updates are for Palm's webOS, and a few for Android. Most information has remained static. If you haven't taken a look yet, the spreadsheet outlines the available mobile platforms and lists such things as IDE, programming language, framework, and ecommerce such as distributors. If you are trying to decide what platform to support or where to 'port next, it's a nice snapshot of key information.

I'm on a quest for new Personal Information Management (PIM) apps! Recently I moved to an iPhone from a decade-long stint with the Palm OS. My husband's Treo 650 went into an infinite reset loop and we were ready to renew our AT&T contract. It was time for a new phone, we had to stay with AT&T (only wireless service that will work in our house), and neither of us wanted a Centro (only PalmOS choice), so it was time to move onto another platform.

Palm Addict, one of the oldest community blogs, focused on mobile, just handed out awards to two of our software titles, Trip Boss and Date Wheel.

Perhaps the most active part of marketing using the 4P's (Product, Price, Promotion, and Place (Distribution) is Promotion. Once you design your product, set your price, and select your distribution methods, not much additional effort in these areas is required. At this point, you must unleash your promotional tools.

A few blogs around the 'net have been discussing pricing of apps in the iPhone AppStore. I just wanted to note a few as a follow-up, since I had covered similar ideas in my previous blog post, Finding the Right Price - Marketing Mobile Software – Part II, Price.

Sorry for the recent hiatus. We've been busy working on our new iPhone applications, plus we took a vacation (via train!) in November for two weeks, and then the holidays hit, which requires a lot of personal attention. I have several posts in mind and hope to crank them out in the near future.

It looks like everyone is joining the wave of application stores on-device after the success of Apple's iPhone AppStore. Hopefully this new trend will help promote mobile applications as a whole. I'm still waiting for those 2 million Centro users to discover software on the Palm OS platform. ;-)