Mobile Topics

* Note:  This is a first in our series of 2011 Predictions.  Check back every day next week for others, and on January 1 for a collection of all of them, and to vote for your favorite.

One of my favourite people in the mobile developer ecosystem is Ed Schmidt from AT&T.  Ed is a Director in their Developer Program which is a nice title and all, but doesn’t really speak to the volume of his knowledge of mobile development nor his passion for developers.  I thought it would be fun to interview him and get his predictions for 2011. 

Deeper Apps vs Lighter Apps

As other technologies are evolving around mobile development, Ed sees a trend toward deeper and more capable applications coming in 2011.  Ed’s definition of Deeper Apps is similar to what we at WIP have been calling Mobile Apps 2.0 – a confluence of stronger technology, better tools, and better product/life cycle development.

Ed noted that some of this will come because of ‘the cloud; and the networking based...

Vodafone UK announced this week that it was making a significant change to its unlimited data plans, and will now begin charging users if they go over 500MB of traffic in a month. This comes after operators like AT&T and Verizon in the US have talked about seeing the industry shift to usage-based data pricing from flat-rate or unlimited plans. These sorts of stories might not seem all that important for mobile developers, but they're worth paying attention to.

Undoubtedly one of the industry trends that sowed the seeds of the current boom in mobile data use and app downloads was the spread of affordable flat-rate data plans. No matter what the actual financial cost of usage-based pricing plans, they carry a significant mental transaction cost for users, where they're constantly trying to decide if a link is worth clicking on, or something's worth downloading, because they're being charged for it. By setting data usage at an easily understood flat monthly rate, that transaction...