What cell phone has the widest potential market for software?

Question

I developed a flashcard program a while back for learning Japanese. I've been considering porting it to a cell-phone. What is a good target platfrom? I'm thinking about iPhone, HTC Touch HD (system software: Windows Mobile) or a Nokia (system software: Symbian). Since I know a bit of JavaME, something that runs that would also be cool.

Answer 1

Here's the most recent market share data. Have you considered building a web-based product consumable by all smartphones with decent web browsers? Sites like x.facebook.com are not OS-specific but are app-like enough to provide a good user experience. Building such a site and charging a subscription would be one approach to serve all markets.

Answer 2

Well the Apple store just celibrated its 1,000,000,000 download the other day, so I would say that the iPhone is the largest and easiest phone market to target. Also the Apple store makes it extremely easy to sell your application (they keep part of the revenue of course).

Perhaps you might like to ask which phone has the largest market share in Japan?

Also I understand Microsoft has plans to start an app store for Windows Mobile.

Answer 3

Well I would start to find a system / programing language which is available for the top phones on the market.

I think a good go is python for that. Which makes it easy to use large portions of the same code on all of the phones which are going to be supported.

Then I would probably start with the iPhone, because I believe its userbase is still demanding for new toys :)

Creating a webapplication would be another way... but that would mean you need to be online. if you are not using flash or some other possibilities of persistent storage.

P.S.: I would not use javame :) .. I still don't like anything java at all

Answer 4

Since you know JavaME, take a look at developing for Android. It doesn't have a large market share, but at least you'll be able to leverage your existing skills.

You won't be able to find a common language and development environment that works on the majority of phone platforms. Once you select a platform, you're kind of committed to it unless you want to port your app to an entirely different language.

Answer 5

A few weeks ago I was reading an article about a product called "rohmobile" that was a custom Ruby framework that run's on a micro ruby web server. It allows you to compile your application against all the popular mobile phones (Apple, Microsoft, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian). It seemed like a very cool idea and it's open source actively under development. The framework comes with a sync soltuion, so you can persist data to the local device using REST/SOAP. As I explored the product a bit more, the only thing that seemed like it would be a pain is the setup of the enviroment(s) needed to compile the code for the various device.... if you could make it past this, then you'd have a solution where you could support a bunch of difference devices with a single code base!

http://www.rhomobile.com/

** I've never programmed in Ruby but the syntax and the demo made it look really simple, since it's really just a local web page running on the micro web server installed on the device! The UI is HTML/CSS based. I think the product is still in Beta...

Just my 2cents~

Answer 6

Nokia has started heavily pushing a mobile development platform based on Qt. Nokia sells a LOT more phones than Apple does.

Why write iPhone app #1,000,001 when you'd be lucky to get $500 for your investment?

There's a huge craze around iPhone apps... at this point it's totally unjustified from a developer point of view. (It's great for the users)

Qt is a really amazingly well done C++ platform (Nokia bought it, obviously :). I'm having a good time writing PC apps with it... I plan on buying a Nokia phone I can write Qt apps for soon. At that point, I'll be ditching my old iPhone (original unit, not 3G).

When the SDK came out, I thought the world of the iPhone. I even bought Apple stock. However, no Java & no Flash because Jobs is a control freak is just plain stupid. GPL incompatibility really hurts, too. I'm also not buying a Mac just to develop software for the thing.