On mobile applications

A lot of people have been burnt predicting a big future for mobile applications. The last one to really break out was SMS in the mid-nineties. Since then there have been various stabs at other useful applications but none of them have really stuck. I remember using an early version of mobile internet access in about 2000 and it was terrible. Since then I have stuck to very simple mobiles which do calls and text without having to be recharged every five minutes.

The problem is that the breakthrough of mobile is much trumpeted but has never really delivered. Now, along came the iPhone and forced everyone to raise their game and now we are just beginning to see the start of what is possible. But where we are really seeing useful mobile applications is in the developing world. Mobiles are everything there, because there is no alternative. No landlines and, for most people, no personal web access.

The applications they create have to be simple because the devices have not got the power to support anything more. Despite this restriction mobile banking has taken off in the developing world far better than in the West. Again, this is partly due to people not having access to traditional banking which has meant skipping an intermediate stage of development just as had happened with telephony.

One current hindrance to better mobile applications in the developed world is poor battery life but once that is solved, iPhone levels of usefulness will become more widespread. At the moment smartphones are still a niche pursuit with most people using their phones primarily for voice and text. People do use their phones for photos and music but both are just ported from other devices rather than a new communications technology as SMS was. This is not to say that these functions don’t have potential to do more, just that nothing has yet.

The primary advantage of smartphones is location awareness. The types of services which take advantage of this are still restricted to enthusiasts. A friend of mine added Google Latitude when it came out and found nobody else he knew used it. It will need smartphones to become as ubiquitous as phones before we see things take off but the increasing power and decreasing cost of new devices means that the future of mobile applications is around the corner after a few false dawns.