There’s lots of chatter about ‘openness’ in the mobile space recently. If you’re listening to the media, you’re hearing it both on the handset and the network side. We’ve got the 700MHz spectrum auction that’s just wrapped up in which Google so cleverly forced the ‘openness’ provision to kick in. Verizon, the largest operator in the US (and the big winner in the C block that’s now required to be ‘open’), making statements that they’re going to allow ‘any device’ on their network.On the device side the noisiest development is coming from Google and the Android device platform, but don’t forget about the Linux Mobile organization and the soon to be opening of the iPhone via the recently released SDK. So what does this all really mean?
I want to dig into this notion of ‘open’ a little bit more to see if I can offer some color or shed some light on what really is (or is not) going to happen in the near term. First off, let’s take a look at the network side. Depending on the perspective, there really are a number of ways to think of how open a network is
From the developer perspective:
- Can I easily push messages to any user?
With regards to the first topic, by and large a developer’s only choice is to leverage an aggregator. Here in the US this also requires the acquisition of a short code (even if you are only ever going to send MT messages…) - Can any user freely navigate to my site?
For those of you who don’t remember, this is not as trivial as it may sound. Back in the day ‘walled garden’ really meant ‘walled garden’ and some devices or services were constructed without the ability to enter an arbitrary URL. Today this route can still be thwarted or become problematic due to content transformation engines inserted by the operator which mask the nature of the device that is accessing your site. - Can I deliver applications which can access the network?
There are still issues facing J2ME developers who try to leverage sockets or for that matter anything other than vanilla HTTP.
From the consumer perspective:
- Can I run a device of my own choosing?
Can give my old phone to my sister and have her use it with her account on her operator without grief? - Can I browse to any site I please?
I need to know not only that my data plan allows me free reign to go anywhere at any time, but I also need to know how I can get to the place where I can enter a URL at will and bookmark it. Am I able to re-set the home page of my browser to something of my own choosing? - Can I download and run any application I wish?
Not only do I want to be able to arbitrarily download applications that either a commercial organization wants to sell me, but I can install one that my brother or my IT department has built.
Without a doubt the most reliably open of the mobile interfaces has been the browser. While we’ve gotten beyond the early days of the mobile web as a ‘walled garden’ where users weren’t allowed out (for your own protection of course), operators have a tendency to bury the ‘goto url’ feature on devices they control and have been known to make bookmarking or changing homepages significantly more difficult than need be. That said, content discovery still remains a huge issue, and getting users to your mobile site presents quite a challenge even 10 years on in the mobile web.
Finally, on the network side, the big news here in the US was the 700 MHz auction wherein for the ‘C’ block of spectrum there was an ‘open network’ provision forced. The ironic thing here is that the winner of the auction, Verizon, has historically had the most closed network in the states. Verizon is taking a pretty big step forward but this is really only exciting in the near term if you’re interested in build DEVICES. Note that also from a consumer perspective, you’re talking CDMA here, so until things actually get built and approved on the VZW network, you’re really talking status quo. The other very odd (or not) thing is that Verizon is a Brew house which is inherently a way more closed environment than J2ME. So their pitch of “Any Device, Any App” is really future looking and a compelling story if you are a ‘solution’ developer who wants to also own the hardware design (think of the Amazon Kindle reader…).
Every one of us can come up with plenty of reasons to rant and rail against the operator, but let’s for a moment look at their side of the equation. By and large end users hold the operator accountable and responsible for anything that takes place on his or her phone. If there’s any problem of any kind, Joe or Jane consumer is going to dial customer service and ask for help. This means that the customer service department at an operator is going to get calls about 404 errors on a web site, poorly configured J2ME apps, or errant SMS messages. This is a group that has a hard enough time trying to figure out why they just billed you $6205 this month instead of $62.05, and now you want them to be able to determine that your particular phone doesn’t fully support the CSS Selectors that your favorite website is trying to use? Oh, and by the way, you didn’t get that phone from their store, you bought it from some guy in Denmark on eBay. Think about the web analog here for a moment. If you get spam, or widget you just downloaded doesn’t work, do you pick up the phone and bitch out your ISP? I didn’t think so. If you’ve got a connectivity or routing problem, you’ll call them, but otherwise you’ll go straight to the source that you got the app from. Operators are looking to cut costs wherever they can, and customer service operations are costly ones.
On the handset side today there really are 2 flavors of ‘open’ handset that have any real penetration in the market: Those running some flavor of WindowsMobile and those running some flavor of SymbianOS. By ‘open’ I mean that an end user can install a complied native application and run it at will. I don’t want to get into a pissing match with anyone about how the Blackberry is open because it supports enterprise app development, or how any device with J2ME support is really ‘open’. When it comes down to it if a developer wants to build a mobile app from the ground up install it on a device and walk around with a demo, unless you work for a device manufacturer, the only two choices are Symbian and MS. Now with Android handsets on the horizon that may change longer term. There are also other Linux initiatives out there but it still remains to be seen what sort of market they actually occupy (I remember just how hot and bothered everyone was by the Sharp Zaurus they were selling on the cheap at JavaOne back in 2002 ). So I really wouldn’t put everything into the Linux mobile basket…
So maybe now you’re thinking, ‘Open, shmopen what’s that going to really do for me?’ Well if you’re a gadget lover, probably it will open the doors to lots of new toys, some goofy, some super cool. If you’re looking to deliver information, data, or content end users, I hate to say it, but It’s really just going to make the world a more complicated place. Sad but true.
So, what can you do today? I’m glad you asked. If you’ve not done so already, you better start preparing your site to deliver more than one presentation of your content. Sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, we will see proliferation of user-agents on the horizon and you don’t have to wait for them to hit you to get rolling. Start looking at device intelligence services like Device Atlas and the WURFL. It’s never too soon to start. Don’t wait for your end users to either complain or go away. The frameworks are flexible and expandable so that as the sea of devices expands, they will accommodate new data.
Please don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying that openness is ‘bad,’ I’m just trying to shed a little reality on the love fest that the media sometimes heaps upon the notion.
What do you think? Am I way off base here? Did I miss the point? Please let me know.
