No Spotify app for Maemo leaves N900 owners distraught

Spotify have confirmed they have no intention of developing a Spotify app on the Maemo platform. This is bad news for owners of the Nokia N900, and shows one of the dangers of choosing a phone with a limited market share.

As I’ve been saying for ages, only the most popular mobile phone platforms will attract developers, and the platforms with poor developer support will face a death spiral of decreasing demand as few companies develop their apps on it – which in turn feeds reduced demand as no-one wants a smartphone with no apps!

With so many app stores competing for developers, the market’s become fragmented, and some platforms simply won’t attract enough developers to survive in the long term.

Maemo isn’t dead yet, but Nokia are going to have to pump some serious money into the platform soon to give it a future. Deciding on either Symbian or Maemo would help, as having two competing platforms from the same company is simply crazy!

Maemo at least is open enough to encourage a home-brew open-source version of a Spotify app (which requires you to compile the code on your N900, so isn’t exactly for the non-teccie!), but it’s still a worrying time for fans of Nokia’s new smartphone platform.

Other platforms on the “at-risk” register must include Windows Mobile and Symbian, while Samsung’s Bada, which hasn’t been released yet, has some seroius work ahead of it if it’s to avoid Maemo’s fate and have big-name app companies stress that they’re not going ot develop for it.