Battle Of The Smartphone Software Platforms
How you go about developing software for mobile devices depends primarily on which platform you intend to develop. While there are many large players competing in the the mobile platform market, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious winner.
Jason Hiner in his blog on ZDNet looks at the mobile software platform space and the six competing platforms, Blackberry, iPhone, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Android, and the Palm WebOS. He notes –
While the smartphone market will not consolidate down to just two or three significant platforms like the PC market has, there will definitely be major consolidation in smartphone platforms over the next three to four years. There’s no way that there’s enough room for six big players in the market, even though this market is going to be huge – eventually even bigger than the PC market…
BlackBerry has enough legacy apps and business mojo to stay relevant for years to come. Plus, unlike Apple, Microsoft, and Google, smartphones is the only business that Research in Motion is in, so it doesn’t risk taking its eye off the ball and loosing momentum…
The iPhone is the only other sure bet to survive the smartphone platform shakeout..
Due to the current reach of Symbian, the strong open source overtures made by Nokia, and the fact that Android hasn’t been a slam dunk with the open source community, I think Symbian has the advantage over Android…
I just don’t know if Microsoft is focused enough on the smartphone business to give its smartphone platform the kind of dramatic overhaul it will need to compete and be a market leader…
I think Android is likely to get squeezed and open source mobile developers are much more likely to jump board with Symbian or even Palm…
Keep an eye on Palm and watch for the company to start nibbling away at the market share of its competitors during the second half of the year.
As per Gartner figures quoted in the article, Symbian is still the most dominant player in the market with over 50% market share in 2008. RIM at 16.6% and Windows Mobile at 11.8% are way behind.
Check out the entire article at “Will Android and Windows Mobile get squeezed as smartphone market shakes out?“
