Future of Mobile Development

Question

I was reading an article based on Mobile Development in 2020 and run into such a pessimistic claim:

"But the economics are a different story. The ratio of those developers who will fail is about 90%; they will simply not make a return on their investment or make a good enough living at this," said Mr Laurs.

He said that will result in developers taking their talent elsewhere and also slow down the rate of growth in applications.

Do you think it will be just another hype so that the majority of the developers will have to switch to something else? or What might be the driving force behind this?

Ps: I hope my argumentative question doesn't violate SO rules.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I think his definition of "fail" is a bit too broad. I've worked on a lot of projects that I've never received any direct return on my investment and I haven't considered any of those to be "failures". Sure, I didn't get filthy rich from them but I gained a lot of experience that I'm able to put down on a resume or convey during an interview. I think he's just being overly pessimistic about how the industry works.

EDIT

I read through the article some more. I do think he's right that the amount of new apps flowing in will die down but that's just because the market will be saturated with all the obvious ports. As with any new web technology it's a "fastest gun" race to make IRC clients, tetris games and of course, pac man. I still feel he's acting like this is a tragedy of some kind. I think this will be a much more exciting time when we'll see developers with immensely creative ideas finally come out of the woodwork when they're not afraid of their applications getting lost in the crowd.

Answer 2

It's the basic concept of supply and demand. There's a huge demand for mobile applications now, with the mobile devices evolving to a state that you can actually do stuff (mostly bigger display and higher processing power). It is not a market that is mature now, so there are a lot of opportunities - explaining the big number of players joining the game.

As the market matures, big players are going to stand out, making the competition tougher, so I think it's save to say the single players will have a harder time competing.

The market is going to stabilize at a point in time. For now it's growing fast and there is still place for it

Answer 3

I dont really see the hype over mobile development. So far (with some exceptions) the overwhelming majority of applications I've seen can be split into 2 categories - games / toys, and apps that are simply front ends onto existing websites (for example the facebook app).

Other than games, the number of applications that actually do anything in their own right is astoundingly low (london tube map applications are the only ones the spring to mind), and the majority of the rest of the apps very little user experience improvement beyond basic "offline mode" functionality.

Personally I see the majority of future of mobile development as being web based, with improments to mobile browsers and offline browsing. If the in-browser experience is good enough, and users are able browse downloaded cached copies of websites then the owners of those sites wont need to invest in mobile development across the 3-4 different platforms available, which is comparatively more expensive than web development.

The exception of course being games and toys - the web isnt really a suitable platform for these. At the same time the sorts of users who are going to buy games are probably the same people who already own smartphones, so I cant really see this market growing massively without innovation on the part of the game authors.

The other exception being applications that require access to things like the camera or microphone (and to a certain extent GPS - there is no reason why location information cant be sent to websites by the browser). However once I cant see there being a huge number of applications that fall into this category.