2010: Year of the Mobile Developer
I’m officially declaring 2010 as the Year of the Mobile Developer! I’m not the first to do so, but wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment so I wanted to put WIP’s weight behind it. It’s not that developers weren’t recognized before in the mobile sector; but it’s truly the first year that developers have been embraced and respected as key members of the mobile ecosystem. I hope it’s also the year that developers can take a more collective stand and give direct feedback to the bigger companies; and WIP wants to coordinate that effort.
The proof of the Year of the Mobile Developer is extensive in our key industry events. CES had a good showing of developers this year with a variety of activities starting with AT&T’s Developer Summit starting off the week; Mobile World Congress (MWC)pulled out all the stops with the new App Planet Hall full of exhibits, dev conferences and complementary passes to developers; and the upcoming CTIA Wireless has its own version with App World, full of more great activities for developers.
What’s even more powerful - the word ‘developer’ is being spoken at C-level strategy meetings of our big companies. I’ve heard from many developer program insiders who are a bit gob smacked and very excited that this is happening as their hard work advocating and supporting developers is being recognized, and indeed many programs are being given larger budgets and dispersed approaches to developers are being brought together.
Then there is the collaboration of the big company’s initiatives such as:
- OneAPI that is running its first trials in Canada,
- OMTP’s BONDI is picking up speed,
- along with JIL (Voda, Verizon, China Mobile, Softbank;
- and announced at AT&T’s Summit was an alliance between AT&T, Orange and America Movil to share developers.
All of these are key to the new WAC initiative (Wholesale Application Community) announced by 24 operators at MWC. Which claims that ” for the developer, particularly small developers, the alliance will create an environment in which they can flourish and create applications in a straight-forward and effective manner”.
Now granted some of these initiatives are defensive moves by the operators against the likes of Android and Apple; but I say good on them for doing something and it sounds like they are moving quite fast.
There is still something missing though... direct developer involvement in these initiatives. I would love to get your feedback on 2010 being the Year of the Mobile Developer and these various initiatives. What do you think? What should their first priorities be? Of course we think they need to go faster to alleviate fragmentation and increase the revenue share to developers (and pay them faster too!)
Provide your comments here; and make sure to attend the first UnPanel at our upcoming WIPJam at CTIA Wireless (Monday, March 22) where we will debate and gather the comments from the developer community to send to the folks making the decisions.