I've been reading a new survey of mobile developers from VisionMobile. Around 400 developers were surveyed, and the platforms covered were iPhone, Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, Java ME, Windows Phone, Flash, and the mobile Web.

The topic is significant. Companies everywhere are crying out for mobile apps, especially for Apple iPhone but increasingly for Google Android as well. The device+cloud computing model is today's big trend, and support for mobile devices in some form or other is becoming necessary for a wide range of applications and web sites.

The first notable fact is the extent to which iPhone and Android dominate. This chart on page 10 tells the story: there is little relationship between the device installed base and the number of available apps. Windows Phone, for example, has 75 million devices out there but only 13,500 apps; iPhone has 60 million devices and 225,000 apps.

 

The reason is that Apple has created a viable ecosystem for development, as well as a superb mobile platform. Much as I dislike the locked-down nature of that platform, and its Apple tax, I acknowledge and admire what has been achieved.

Android has just 20 million devices but 72,000 apps. I'd guess that the quality of those apps is not as high on average, but it's still clear that iPhone now has competition.

If this paper is to be believed, Android will even pass iPhone. Android is identified as the most popular among developers, with around 60% using it versus 50% on iPhone. Why?

We believe that Android's lead in developer mindshare ahead of Apple's iOS is down to two factors: first the $99 fee developers have to pay in order to deploy their applications, an entry barrier which reduces the innovation from developing countries. Secondly, the very effective use of open source licensing as a marketing technique to attract developers to Google's Android.

Another factor is that Android apparently offers the best developer experience. In an appendix, the survey tests iOS, Android, Symbian and Java ME for coding, debugging, device emulation and support resources. Novices could create a simple app more quickly on Android. The coding effort was less; building 9 simple apps took nearly 3000 lines of code on Symbian, versus just under 1500 lines on iPhone and a little over 1000 lines on Android. Debugging is faster on Android. The survey comes up with the following claim:

Using the above data, we can say that when developing common applications, each hour of work for a given Android developer, irrespective of level of experience, equals 1 hour and 10 minutes for a Symbian developer, 1 hour and 20 minutes for a Java ME developer and approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes for an iPhone developer.

Contentious, no doubt, and a lot will depend on what sort of app is being developed. Still, a good result for Android.

Both iPhone and Android seem safe bets, but what about other platforms? Adobe Flash is an interesting one:

Our research further indicates that Flash developer mindshare seems to be in decline, despite Flash's installed handset base of more than 1.3B devices. Adobe's string of execution failures has meant that the installed base for Flash Lite is extremely fragmented, breaking the write-once-show-anywhere story for media brands who are Adobe's key customers. At the same time, Flash, the much-touted replacement for Flash Lite, was more than 18 months late, while Flash Lite shipments have stagnated, dropping from 43 percent to 15 percent of handsets sold from 1H09 to 2H09. This leaves Adobe with a rapidly shrinking window of opportunity, primarily on Android handsets, while having been banned from Apple's growing empire, and slowly seeing the adoption of HTML5, yet another replacement threat for Flash.

That's overly negative in my view. In favour of Flash is that it runs on the Web and desktop as well as on mobile, and will run across a number of mobile platforms. Even so, the research shows the pressure on Adobe to deliver mobile Flash, which will not be in the hands of the public until Android 1.2 "froyo" is availble on devices; and the Apple problem will not go away.

Symbian is in trouble too; in fact, since Nokia is now moving to MeeGo for smartphones, it now has little interest for developers. Some observers think Nokia should go to Android instead.

Java ME? Windows?

The vast majority of Java ME respondents have lost faith in the write-once-runanywhere vision. Moreover, anecdotal developer testimonials suggest that half of Windows Phone MVP developers (valued for their commitment to the platform) carry an iPhone, and would think twice before re-investing in Windows Phone.

That strikes me as accurate. Predicting the future is hard though. Google Android came from nowhere; it is possible that a couple of years from now different patterns will have emerged.

For now though, it's iPhone and Android all the way.

When an industry gets big enough to spawn other sectors that grow parasitically on top of it, then you can tell it has some decent critical mass. And in many cases, that's where to look for jobs, or even start your own small venture.

Take mobile applications, for example. We all know that the iPhone has done exceedingly well as an application platform. So well, in fact, that start-ups are now forming with the sole purpose of measuring just how well. One such startup, Distimo, focuses on analysing trends in the mobile application space. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it found that Apple leads the field by an order of magnitude. At the recent World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, Distimo said that there are 150,000 applications in the iPhone app store, compared with just 20,000 in that of its nearest competitor, Android.

Let's face it, iPhone apps are so accessible that someone might download one for 99 cents sitting on the toilet, instead of leafing through a back copy of National Geographic. Their accessibility can convert into serious amounts of money for developers. Tapulous, a 20-strong development company that makes games and social software for Apple's Jesus-phone, is now making $1 million each month from them. Not everyone can be that successful, but most of us would take just a small slice of that particular pie.

What makes it so bizarre is that Apple is such a fascistic company. People can write any application they want for Android, and upload it to the app store without any third-party arbitration. Apple, on the other hand, has a notoriously draconian app approval policy. For example, it took an arbitrary decision to remove almost all sexual applications from the app store this month -- but chose to leave in apps from organisations such as Sports Illustrated and Playboy. This is unlikely to make developers happy -- but with such a lot of money at stake, who's going to complain very loudly?

The unknown quantity in mobile applications is Microsoft. It chose Barcelona as the venue to announce the mobile edition of Windows 7, which is a marked improvement on all previous versions of Windows Mobile. It's a beautiful looking system, with a sleek user interface, and promised links into services such as Xbox Live, which will be like flypaper for consumers. But not everyone is convinced that developers will support the platform. Beejive CEO Kai Yu is quoted here as saying that the company has simply ruined its reputation with mobile developers too much in the past. There's also the fact that we won't see the first of these phones until the fourth quarter, which puts Microsoft way behind the curve compared to the competition.

But whether you choose the iPhone, Android, Microsoft, or another competitor such as the recently open-sourced Symbian, there are worse ways to make money than by developing a mobile application -- even if you do it on the side, rather than taking it up was your day job. If you can avoid the hundreds of me-too applications out there and do something truly original, perhaps you could even be the next Tapulous.

Not the imaginative type? Worry not, my developer friend. Such is the momentum behind this industry that you can even get away without having an original thought in your head. Organisations such as iPhoneAppQuotes are springing up to connect creative thinkers with the software developers who can make their ideas an reality. But my advice: if anyone comes to you suggesting the ultimate iCleavage app for the iPhone, you might want to think twice.

Mobile devices are today's development battleground. Timing is everything: I recall Borland's 2003 conference when it introduced an extensive mobile development strategy based on the ill-fated C++ BuilderX, with SDKs from Nokia and Symbian. The sessions drew sparse attendance and Borland later abandoned the product, returning to the Windows-oriented C++ Builder.

So what changed? In part, devices have become more powerful and mobile internet access faster and more pervasive, making the platform more attractive. A bigger factor though is Apple's iPhone. In hindsight, the mobile vendors and operators made mobile development too difficult, with fragmented platforms and locked-down devices. Microsoft has had some success extending Windows to mobile devices, for enterprise development in either C++ or .NET, but its market share is too small, the devices insufficiently well liked, and the deployment obstacles too great. Java had some success too, but write-once, run anywhere never really worked for mobile.

Enter iPhone, with a single platform and easy deployment through the App Store. The "easy deployment" part has to be qualified, since developers have been confronted with limited access to the device, restrictions on what they can develop, and an opaque approval process; but it has worked, and the potential of the mobile platform - about which we have known for years - is now being unlocked.

Other vendors are belatedly rising to the challenge. I'm just back from Nokia's Qt Developer Days, and saw the energy the company is putting into creating a cross-platform, open source mobile development framework. Windows Mobile, Maemo and Symbian are on the immediate roadmap. On the deployment side, Nokia has the Ovi store. I've also been at Adobe's MAX in Los Angeles, where broad mobile support for the Flash runtime was the big story. The Flash runtime is not coming to iPhone yet, but Adobe has a native compiler for Flash applications which targets iPhone. Adobe also has app store plans. Google Android is another platform where all the pieces are in place, and Palm Web OS a new hopeful on the scene.

This means developers now have numerous choices for mobile development, as well as more pressure to create or extend applications to embrace mobile clients. It is not an easy choice. An AJAX application will work on the iPhone and elsewhere, but there is no offline support or access to device features, and the capabilities of mobile browsers vary greatly - though Webkit is becoming a standard on non-Windows devices. Native iPhone works great on Apple's device, but nowhere else. Flash is becoming interesting, but devices with 10.1 will not be around until next year and it is an unproven platform in a mobile context. Windows Mobile will trudge on, though Microsoft's mobile story seems particularly incoherent at present and I expect declining market share. Java on mobile has not gone away either; and Google Android is pretty much a Java platform. C++ will always be attractive for lean, fast applications.

It is fun to pick winners and losers, but impossible to tell how all this will shake out. Here's two safe bets. The first is that mobile, internet-connected applications are in many ways the future of the client. The second is that focusing on a strong web services API (of whatever flavour) is the right place to start. What's your mobile strategy?