What smartphones to target for a modern b2c app?

Question

We want to build a smartphone app which uses geolocation, etc. and target the most important smartphones. Which OS would you support for a b2c application? I found a german statistic here: http://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/150842/umfrage/prognostizierte-marktanteile-der-smartphone-betriebssysteme-in-2013/ which forecasts the smartphone usage for 2013. To summarize it lists the following OS, ordered by priority:

Symbian, Android, Blackberry (RIM), Windows Mobile, iPhone

Would you agree with this priority or should we start with the classical: iPhone/Android combo?

Answer 1

Wright now and in a foreseeable near future, iPhone and iPad are the trendy options, for most categories of consumers. Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices are more the tools of business oriented people. So I guess it's more about your target audience than general usage. iPhone OS and Android will cover, in my opinion, the most ground.

Answer 2

I'd do a quick prototype for Android (as it's a simple platform to develop for) first. Then consider iPhone & probably RIM.

Answer 3

It probably depends on the market you're targeting. The statistics you're quoting might be right for Germany but in the US situation is quite different. Blackberry still holds the biggest share, but if your app is a consumer (not business) one, iPhone/iPad and Android is the clear choice. Symbian is not a large player here at all, besides, there's a lot of talks going on about a crisis of the platform so I wouldn't even take it into consideration.

Answer 4

The only "crisis" in the Symbian Platform is the gradual shift towards Qt. If you develop a new app for Symbian, use Qt, which is a very nice and powerful environment. The Nokia Qt SDK is worth a try.

In Europe and large parts of Asia, Symbian outsells all the other platforms combined, so the market is huge. In the US, Symbian barely exists, because Nokia isn't much of a player there.

Answer 5

I would recommend you to take a look at Mobile Community Framework (MCF). This is a cross-platform framework that supports all today's smartphone OS - iPhone, Android, Symbian, Blackberry and WinMobile. It can perform tasks like simple object transfer over network in Wi-Fi Ad-Hoc mode (for direct connections) or through dedicated proxy server, defining and exchanging geolocation and discovering peers running specific MCF-enabled apps in a given radius. It is free and simple to use.

More info at http://uvamobiltec.com