A Windows Mobile Developer Journeys into the World of Apple iPhone
We started developing for the Pocket PC 2000 in 2001. It has been quite a journey with Microsoft, evolving our products to work with the ever changing developer tools and operating systems for mobile. In the past seven years, Windows Mobile has evolved from something barely usable for business to a highly competent mobile business platform.
Just when it seemed that Microsoft had finally made mobile business a reality, Apple announced the iPhone. Well, I just couldn’t resist checking it out from the perspective of developing business applications.
So What’s Up with the Apple iPhone?
A huge amount of hype was generated when it was announced about a year ago. My initial reaction: Well…it is missing features essential to business, so it is just a gadget, and besides, it has no keyboard, how lame is that?
A year later, yet another round of hype over iPhone’s supposed accommodation to the business and enterprise. The actual number of iPhones sold is up for debate, but clearly a large number have been sold, likely larger than the total number of Windows Mobile phones sold in the same period.
Although Apple clearly has a brilliant solution for the worlds of graphics , music and video, the company’s forays into the world of business with the Mac have been less than spectacular. But, I was primed to see what the hoopla was all about, and decided to carefully evaluate a webcast of the March 6, 2008 Apple Town Hall meeting.
iPhone Has Business Possibilities
Even weeks after exiting the famed Steve Jobs reality distortion field, I come away with the impression that Apple got much of it right for the business enterprise smartphone market. Before the announcement, a concern was that Apple was not going to support push email, Apple was going to severely limit access by the developer to the native OS on the iPhone, generally place too many restrictions on what could be done, etc.
For the most part, these fears were ungrounded, although some significant rough spots remain to be clarified. What Apple got right was negotiating the deal with Microsoft to get Exchange ActiveSync push email and remote wipe. They also arranged for Cisco IPSec VPN support. These are critical additions for serious enterprise business support of the iPhone or any cell phone targeted at the business market.
The Apple iPhone SDK deal for developers also gets an A rating from me. The tool set appears to be comprehensive, a layered environment supporting native code with optional object and memory management. It appears that technically speaking, one can implement anything on the iPhone that could be implemented on Windows Mobile.
But . . .
That said, there appears to be usage restrictions in the license agreement to prevent your application from doing certain things that are common on Windows Mobile. These things are powerful, capable of enhancing the user experience, but also capable of mischief, intentional or otherwise. It is not exactly clear to me if these usage guidelines by Apple are intended to be recommendations or absolute restrictions.
For example, the guidelines prohibit applications that operate in the background, insisting that applications completely shut down if any other activity is taken, such as answering a phone call. Attempting to accurately recreate the state of a business transaction with a secure server because you were interrupted by an incoming phone call might be difficult or impossible. I think this particular usage guideline by Apple might need some revision or clarification.
A positive aspect is the Apple business deal for selling third party applications. Taken as a whole, the Apple deal might be significantly better than what can be accomplished currently for Windows Mobile. If you market your own Windows Mobile application, the ecommerce costs for payment collection range from 3% to 10%, not counting marketing costs. If you place your product on venues like Handango or Cellmania, the costs increase to 40% to 70% or more of the sale price, but on the plus side, you are placed in the venue store and might get access to a cell phone carrier store. These venues may want to set the sales price at a point lower than you would like, and the price can be arbitrarily changed by the venue as they see fit for sales events or product bundling. They deduct a variety of ecommerce charges from the sales price before computing your percentage of compensation.
Apple’s charge is a straight forward 30% of the sales price. For that 30%, Apple covers the ecommerce charges themselves, leaving you 70% of the sales price established by you, not Apple. Since Apple has arranged that all application sales occur through their one store, their 30% charge includes a powerful application marketing method. This method is a button added to the iPhone home screen that accesses the Apple store for purchase and download of your application directly from the store onto your iPhone. You can optionally augment this with your own marketing programs.
A potential downside to the software developer of the Apple offering is they absolutely control of what applications get offered for sale on the iPhone. You might invest a significant amount of energy in developing an iPhone application, only to find it rejected by Apple. Apple has outlined what appear to be generally reasonable categories of “prohibited” applications. It remains to be seen how carefully submitted applications will be screened by Apple.
Will too many applications be rejected by Apple? It is more likely that Apple will approve most of the large number applications expected to be submitted, and reject or remove only those that clearly violate the guidelines or generate complaints after initial sales.
A different problem arises for enterprises developing their own custom iPhone applications for distribution only to company employees. Apple allows distribution of these types of applications, but apparently requires the application distribution to occur through the Apple store. I expect that many an enterprise would feel more secure if they could distribute the application from their own servers. Only digitally signed applications will be allowed to operate on the iPhone. This gives Apple the control mechanism to enforce their restrictions.
Perhaps the questions raised here will be answered by Apple in a positive way. I am betting on that result, based on what we have seen so far.
The iPhone Experiment
In a coming series of blog posts, I am going to document Aton International’s journey as we port a relatively complex application from Windows Mobile to the iPhone. Our next blog post will examine how to get started with an iPhone project by correlating the iPhone development environment with Windows Mobile’s. I invite your comments along the way.
Charles Wilde, CTO and Founder of Aton International, Inc., is a mobile/embedded system veteran with 25+ years of successful application development experience. As time permits, he’ll answer your tough questions about mobile app development or Windows Mobile to help you complete a project successfully.
To contact Charles Wilde, go to the Aton International, Inc website.
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