2008 has been the year of the smartphone, but we ain’t seen nothing yet! With Android, the iPhone, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and yet more smaller players all fighting amongst each other to be crowned king of the smartphone, we consumers are about to be swamped by a torrent of new devices fighting for our hard earned pennies.

While that sounds good at first glance, dig a bit deeper and you’ll see a problem emerge – four competing and completely non-interoperable operating systems equals four key platforms for software developers to choose from when building their apps.

Unless the developers have large teams and large pockets, they’re going to be forced to choose one or two platforms at most, meaning if you choose a platform that becomes unpopular (Windows Mobile ), then you”ll be out of luck when it comes to buying the fancy app you saw on your friend’s iPhone.

Or worse, you might move from an iPhone to an Android phone, only to find that you have to purchase all the apps you bought for your iPhone all over again, as they won’t work on Android. The nightmare of the fragmented platform looms large, just as it has done for years in the PC market and console market.

What can be done, and who can solve this conundrum? Well, Ericsson, apparently!

Ericsson have proposed a new software initiative that aims to ensure all applications developed on one platform will work on all the others. Effectively, they’re proposing the development of a unified framework based on Java. A version of the framework will be implemented for each platform, but as each version has a common set of APIs, application developers need only write to this uniform platform, rather than the fragmented platforms that are out there now.

This is ambitious to say the least, not just technically, but politically as well. The reason for the fragmentation is vendor lock-in – if you’ve bought 100 iPhone apps, you’re unlikely to switch allegiance to Android, for example, as your apps won’t work, and that’s just the way Apple wants it!

It also somewhat misses the point of all these smartphones. They’re all designed around the concept of the mobile Web, bringing the desktop Web experience to the smartphone. As such, all each platform needs is a decent Web browser, support for JavaScript, AJAX and Flash, and you’re done – one common platform, with all applications being served up by a Web server, rather than being written to each device. You now, like what’s happening on the desktop these days!

Just a thought!

[Source: EETimes]