Interesting article on who will win the race of the mobile runtime
UPDATE Andreas from VisionMobile has provided some feedback in the comments.
VisionMobile has a good article on the race to be the winning mobile runtime for applications e.g. java J2ME, flashlite, webKit, silverlight, lua, python and QT. I do question some of the numbers used in the addressable market e.g. 500M for flashlite versus 800M for javaME. To this day I have never seen flashlite on a mobile but I can’t remember the last moderately capable mobile without java - I am talking most about the Australian and European markets here - it may be more prevalent in the US or Asia. Adobe screwed up big time by charging a license for flashlite, they’ve since abandoned this fee but I think it may be too little too late.
WebKit is becoming a formidable platform by itself. Its HTML5 client side storage will lead to a whole new generation of offline capable web apps (google gears without the spyware). In future standardised javascript access to device capabilities (camera, address book, GPS) means that the only reason not to use web standards to develop mobile apps is if you really need 3D - in which case OpenGL is still the best bet - until VRML comes back:-)
October 30th, 2008 at 11:32 pm
Keith,
The 500m numbers for Flash Lite come from a reliable source who’s familiar with FL volumes expected in 2009. Given that FL is zero royalty, the FL 2009 numbers are high, but still credible. Also I wouldn’t say that FL has missed the window of opportunity - there’s no other runtime which such strong tools and solid deployment record as FL.
Andreas
November 1st, 2008 at 11:52 pm
Hi Andreas,
Thanks for the details - when I think about it my concerns are with the term ‘addressable market’ - the figures seem to ignore all the java phones that are out there now - Sun quote Ovum in saying there are 2.1 BILLION java capable phones out there. I’m sure its probably more accurate to say Sun shipped 2.1 billion java capable phones and perhaps only 1 billion are still in use - either way the number is higher than the charts predictions of 800 million.
Keith