7-8 years ago I developed some cool apps using WAP. The mobile phone apps were able to help several in a few local governments, school systems as well as apartment complexes manage their mobile-workforce and various duties they did.
Back then the alternative was a Java mobile edition (J2ME I think). What is the best mobile development platform to use today. Something that the majority of mobile devices will be able to install and run easily (for the user as well as the developer)?
Was it ever alive? I remember it being "Wait and Pay", and nowadays the mobile phones usually have a "real" browser like Opera Mini or Safari.
I just wonder: Since WAP was for Web Pages, what Apps did you develop? Ít is a Web Server technology, not a client side one?
The alternatives are the SDK of the phone in question (iPhone, Symbian, Windows Mobile) or Java (J2ME) which is theoretically compatible with more phones, but still requires a lot of testing due to different screen resolutions, the existance of a keyboard or not etc.
It may sound stupid, but I think the best mobile platform is the web. You can't know what platform will be the most widely used in a year or two, Symbian, Android, or even that iPhone thing, but you can be sure that more and more mobile devices will get UMTS and/or WLAN and they all will have browsers. And it's pretty easy for you to develop such applications, compared to embedded Java stuff. Plus you can use them from your notebook/desktop too.
"Best" platform obviously depends on your app and your business plan.
Java still has the biggest reach, but even so writing portable J2ME apps is a surprisingly rare art. A lot of people in the industry wish they could come up with something to beat Java. Emphasis on wish.
Smartphones nowadays have real browsers and real bandwidth, although other phones can still be pretty limited there. So if you can rely on your users to have nice phones, a web app is probably the best option to weigh against J2ME.
Those two (and WAP) aside, you're looking at slicing your user base to those with the right brand of hardware.
Symbian, Blackberry OS, and Windows Mobile all have a lot of handsets out there, but you kind of have to pick one. Symbian of course covers more than one manufacturer, but there's two main flavours of Symbian plus the touchscreen issue to create fragmentation. Windows Mobile wishes it covered multiple manufacturers, but in practice they're pretty much all HTC. Writing an app in multiple versions obviously is a lot of work. iPhone is currently small but growing [Edit - growing fast. NPD's Q3 figures put Apple as the second biggest-selling smartphone vendor worldwide, after Nokia. Then RIM, Motorola, HTC. Apple outsold Moto and HTC combined].
Device-specific OSes are "better" than Java in the sense that they offer more control of the device. But if your app doesn't need that, then any device with any of them on it will support at least MIDP1, apart from iPhone (so far: Sun claimed to be working on it, but at the time nobody was quite sure whether to believe them and I haven't been following the issue since. Steve Jobs has been quoted saying words to the effect, and I exaggerate only slightly, of "J2ME is the stupidest thing I ever heard of and we'd all be better off without it".)
BREW and i-mode look like narrow options unless you happen to be in their markets, in which case they have good availability.
WAP isn't dead it has advanced greatly and the current mobile web is powered by WAP 2.0 or XHTML-MP
Surprisingly most people don't actually know that.
If you look these days all the big name players Amazon, Facebook have wap sites try going to m.facebook.com on your mobile phone.
So I would say that WAP is alive and kicking, it just no longer gets waved around as much
WAP 2.0 has the ability to render XHTML-MP.
Approx. 95% of mobile browsers in existence can handle XHTML-MP.
For 5% of potential users, creating WML is probably no longer worth it.
As a user, I have no problem with WAP dying and Moore's law and mobile browser improvements making the web the best mobile platform. But there is a non-technical issue that currently makes WAP still useful: data plan costs.
For example, my Italian mobile carrier offers an affordable, flat rate, WAP data plan accessible via APN wap. The built-in WAP 2.0 browser of my old and cheap mobile phone works via this plan. It is a basic browser with many limitations, e.g. only line by line up/down scrolling rather than page by page scrolling, and it doesn't support numeric shortcut keys for links. Yet it is still useful for accessing the mobile web versions of Gmail, Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter and many more sites.
Opera Mini runs fine and does a good job on my phone even with its tiny 128x160 display, as well as other Java applications such as Gmail Mobile. But since these applications access APN internet and require a full Internet connection, in order to use them with my carrier I would need a much more expensive, time/traffic metered data plan.
So, the current advanced mobile phone browsers probably already do a good job of rendering web pages without the need for WAP versions of sites, and the situation will quickly improve. But they are expensive. Unfortunately, the full Internet mobile data plans required by such browsers remind the early days of metered, dial-up Internet access. Improvements to data plan fees will be slower than technology, at least in certain countries.
WAP is in use in all cellphones. At least partially. Did you buy a ringtone and got a message on your phone to download it? That's WAP! Did you send or receive a picture message (MMS)? That's also WAP (the message transport at least).
So, WAP is still very much in use and an integral part of carrier infrastructures. Without it billing systems would break and some proprietary systems would need to be built. But because WAP is a standard, you can buy any brand phone and it'll just work with your carrier and you can keep buying pictures/ringtones and sending picture messages.
That phones also add regular "full" browsers these days is irrelevant as it's just additional functionality. Companies like Winwap still provide the worlds Android and whatnot devices with WAP Stacks that let's carriers make more money on useless ringtones and pictures that we all love so much...