Mobile application development is finally going where it belongs – six feet under.

For years now, the mobile phone industry has been evolving into an unmanageable stinking blob.

A plethora of incompatible platforms, each of them with its own set of unsolvable issues, hilarious hardware combinations (e.g. the absence of bluetooth on teenager phones to suit the SMS content sales, phones with radio that only works with special headphones, etc.), all kinds of different artificial market barriers, etc.

This article explains it well.

“A platform that is technically flawed but has a good business model will always beat a platform that is elegant but has a poor business model.”

“But we never figured out how to help developers make money. In fact, we paired our elegant platforms with a developer business model so deeply broken that it would take many years, and enormous political battles throughout the industry, to fix it — if it can ever be fixed at all.”

So if you now go out and develop a killer mobile game that you want to bring to the global market space, you have to:

1. Support all kinds of platforms (just “using JAVA” doesn’t solve the problem)
2. Test the product on all of them (which means getting the actual phones, emulators do only half the trick)
3. Get the app certified with the platform providers
4. Get the app certified with the networks
5. Actually sell the stuff

So … we’ve grown quite allergic to the term platform-specific in the last couple of years.

Why? The web, of course.

Sure, it’s got its issues (yes, we all love Internet Explorer with its standard (non-)conformance), but it’s got a waaay smaller barrier to entry than the usual mobile app development.

From the same article as above:

Meanwhile, there is now an alternative platform for mobile developers. It’s horribly flawed technically, not at all optimized for mobile usage, and in fact was designed for a completely different form of computing. It would be hard to create a computing architecture more inappropriate for use over a cellular data network. But it has a business model that sweeps away all of the barriers in the mobile market. Mobile developers are starting to switch to it, a trickle that is soon going to grow. And this time I think the flash flood will last.

There are of course still issues with flat data rate costs and GPRS/UMTS/HSDPA network coverage that are holding back the proliferation of mobile web apps, but I’d say it’s damn worth the wait and/or potential aggravation.

Want to start developing your game for mobiles? Use Flash.

At the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland, the (in-)famous blogger Robert Scoble was walking around with a Nokia camera phone doing impromptu interviews with people like Marc Benioff, Tim O’Reilly and Rick Warren (who runs the largest church in the US, btw) and streaming the videos live to Qik.

While I do find the way he ambushes people with a “you’re live on the internet” scare quite amusing (look at the video below with Michael Dell), I would rather have him do a quality interview with some of these people using a decent camera – I don’t mind waiting a couple of minutes for him to sync the video to see it online.

I agree that live video streaming for everyone is a very useful enabling technology, but just not very much so in this particular field. A clear case of using technology for technology’s sake.