NewLC - iPhone SDK and Business Model - only kids get too excited - Comments

Re: iPhone SDK and Business Model - only kids get too excited

alh — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:55:32 +0100

One year later, we can conclude that the apple store and iphone dev model totally kicked symbians a** all over the place.
In one year, we have more quality apps on appstore then there is for all symbian phones combined, and they do sell... a lot.

None of these apps would have been impossible to make on symbian, some would even run better on symbian phones.
(Well ok multitouch might be a problem, but the other phone manufacturers practicly gave that one to Apple by being so slow and having so low expectations on mobile UIs...)

But still, most symbian phone owners doesn't even know its possible to install apps on their phone.

The key was a good distribution system IN THE PHONE, with easy payment build in, just click and get it.
Downloaded apps equal to any built in app.
Combined with excellent developer support with clear and complete documentation, and a very easy "Click and buy to get everything including distribution" model for SDK.

Just as I've always said it should be...

No extremely complicated "security" schemes.
Easy testing.
Well thought through Mature APIs (tested in desktop MacOS X environment) that actually do what they say they do.
non-fragmented easy-to-understand APIs (compare reading accelerometer in symbian to in iPhone)
Easy integration with legacy code.
Well working development environment, with a quick-to-start emulator and well working device testing, to not stall the developers creativity.

Still, symbian has a definite edge on "business type" applications, since you have a lot more freedom when making symbian apps (also freedom to make bad apps).
In Apple OS you can often feel stuck in the frame Steve Jobs defined for you.

But for the consumer... well AppStore won so much that everyone else is now copying them.

Except ofcourse... they just look at the AppStore, and forget that half the reason (at least) is in the "other end", making it easy for developers big and small, to bring quality apps to the platform.

Re: iPhone SDK and Business Model - only kids get too excited

eric — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:09:00 +0100

Thanks for your comments regarding Obj-C. I really don't know how it works, though, have had a look at some Obj-C code a few days ago. It looked very ugly to me with lots of annotations, etc. I didn't like it.

Regarding Objective-C, I agree, it also looks ugly to me - kind of lisp with [ ] instead of ( ) ! ) but it is very simple to learn. We however have multi-year experience of Objective-C / Cocoa environment and it is rather easy to learn. At least compared to Symbian !

Re: iPhone SDK and Business Model - only kids get too excited

svdwal — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 21:44:28 +0100

Hi Tote

I am a bit mystified by your defence of Handango. Handango is a business, and will (as every other business) go for the highest price it thinks the market can afford while maximising their profits. It has nothing to do with the fact that revenue stream of selling apps is their only source of income. Lots of people, businesses and governments have a single source of income, and that in itself has never been the sole reason for being able to increase that revenue stream at will.

The problem that you need a Mac to develop for the iPhone might be a problem for freeware developers, but not for commercial ones. While you are not allowed to run Mac OS in a virtual machine on a PC, you are allowed to run WinXP on an Intel Mac in a virtual machine.

The news that C++ can be done for the iPhone too is very good news for Symbian developers, as they can now leverage their development investment on a new platform.

Finally, for commercial developers the problem boils down to a single question: will iPhone buyers be software buyers? If they are not, who cares. If they are, then an additional investment in iPhone dev tools might well be worth it.

Re: iPhone SDK and Business Model - only kids get too excited

Genesis P — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 22:21:07 +0100

I don't know. I did some MIDP 2.0 programming then I did some Symbian programming. MIDP was nice. However, Symbian was nice too. I don't think Symbian demands something impossible from the developer. On the contrary, an experienced developer will very quickly familiriaze herself with Symbian concepts.
Symbian-specific concepts mostly come from understandable restrictions and their realization is quite similar to what we have in other frameworks (like CActive is similar to event map we have in MFC). So, it's not that difficult.
Rather, maybe even useful - an experienced programmer would quickly get on track as he knew the principles already. An unexperienced programmer would think MIDP is easy etc etc and then not knowing the science behind all this would end up with a messy and unmaintainable application. Successful software development requires knowing some theory, not only practice.

Re: iPhone SDK and Business Model - only kids get too excited

tote — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:27:18 +0100

Dear Leviathan,

Thanks for sharing your view, I really appriciate it. Honestly.

I also welcome the new SDK (i.e. iPhone) and believe that eventually everybody will benefit from it. I'm not here to say bad things about it, however, let me comment a couple of things you mentioned in your response:
- I'm not saying that sw distribution (bundled with signing, etc.) is perfect in Symbian. This is definitely a question that has to be worked out well. Maybe Apple's approach will prove to be better than the current solution Symbian/Nokia/UIQ, etc. offer, but that I'm sure will result in further improvement in the Symbian world, too. Please note that there really IS a central application on Nokia devices for downloading content. It's not centralized, Nokia Software Market, Handango, etc. are available among the distributors from where you can buy content.

- We all know that the Symbian emulator has difficulties in some cases to truly emulate the hw environment so that we could check our code to see how it works. However, let me disagree with you saying that in 99.99% the emulator simply does not work as expected. This is simply untrue. Most, I mean most of the things can be tested on emulator, too, in some cases (definitely in minority) can be tested with some tricks and only small fraction of your code cannot be at all. I tell you this having 8 years mobile sw dev experience behind me.

- Documentation: I agree with you that it could be improved further, lots of people are crying about that. I wonder, though, how Apple's documentation can be better with such a young SDK.

- Thanks for your comments regarding Obj-C. I really don't know how it works, though, have had a look at some Obj-C code a few days ago. It looked very ugly to me with lots of annotations, etc. I didn't like it.

- As to multi-threading, don't tell me that keeping shared resources protected with mutexes, semaphores, doing synchronization, etc. is easier than getting to know how active objects and related framework work.

- I know that there are newcomers who have problems with learning descriptors, active objects, sockets, etc., but after a few weeks (2-3 months?) everybody should have spent enough time to deal with these paradigms with good confidence. And it's not that different compared to other development environments. For example, it took me a few days to be familiar to active objects and sockets. Including Symbian client-server architecture.

Again, thanks for your comments,

Tote

Re: iPhone SDK and Business Model - only kids get too excited

Leviathan2040 — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:54:06 +0100

Just a few months ago I would never imagined that I could write something positive about the iPhone and/or its SDK, BUT.....

I come from 7 years of experience with Symbian SDK, I went thru every possible pain with them and never really got something back or meaningful. The iPhone SDK is not just a nice cherry on top of the cake, it is a whole new cake.

I honestly don't agree with some of the points you list:

1) Distribution: you know this would have helped us enormously if Nokia would have embedded some software to allow distribution and download on handset. After you have been fighting with the Symbian SDK, signing and whatever, for distribution you are on your own again or with Handhango (with no Symbian download AND purchase client) with 60% of profit going to them.

2) Tools and SDK: we don’t have yet an emulator on Symbian rather a simulator that is just ‘remotely’ related to the code, 99.99% of the times the code that works on the simulator do not work on the actual device. The quality of documentation simply cannot be compared: even if young, the iPhone has an incredible good quality examples database, info and API documentation. The Symbian docs are rubbish, they always have been: help files intermixed with OEM stuff; incredible ‘HOW TOs’ that should explain how to do basic things but they never show actually how to. Examples that don’t even compile or require manufactures capabilities. And let’s not even start with the whole capabilities thing, right?

3) Objective-C: I had (and still have) more problems in dealing with Symbian C++ descriptors (and let's not forget the cleanup stack....) rather than Obj-C. A couple of hours let’s you master it completely, as it is a superset of C. Also, Obj-C is required only for the outer shell of the application (the one that communicates with the OS/Hardware), but you can intermix Obj-C, C and C++ even in the same file without any problem, so you don’t have to convert your code base at all; I compiled my C++ applications (thank God, kept platform neutral) in about a couple of hours

4) You can multitask, there are restrictions on processes that run on the background, I don’t have an issue with that. Should we talk about multithreading instead and the damn Active Objects?

Over the years I have been supportive and followed Nokia/Symbian in everything they did, they never ever listened to developers, release after release SDKs have been getting worse. They never had clear directions on tools, finally landed on a thing built around Eclipse that requires a mainframe just to run. With the price I have to pay for Carbide Pro (because the personal one is unusable) I can buy a Mac Book and download the excellent XCode for free.

I still distinctively remember the first time I tried to open a socket on Symbian, 4 weeks spent on studying docs, classes, examples and so on and the everlasting sensation of unfinished/incomplete code blob. On the iPhone? About one hour and I should not worry about handling access points, connections, signing and shit like that…

Goodbye Symbian….

iPhone SDK and Business Model - only kids get too excited

tote — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:23:27 +0100

I think it's a good idea to wait a bit with commenting the announement of big things. You might not be as fast as others, but at least will have a broader view to the whole picture. At least that's what I did with Steve jobs announcement about the iPhone SDK (official press release is here) and developer program.