You are involved in an amazing economic experiment that, at the top level, has two totally different business models about to go head-to-head. Apple’s proprietary, closed system where everything has a cost associated and Google’s massive mission of open source (or is it really a freemium model disguised as open source?).

And strangely, the most pervasive platform in the world market, Nokia, does not seem to be a major player in this experiment.
I think we have lots of chapters to go before we have any clue what the ending will be.

All three points are of great concern to the mobile marketer and application developer (both of which are after the same user). First hand, I can tell you that a BlackBerry app fell off our radar in early 2009 when we understood the rules of application publishing for Android (i.e. app publishing without review). We believe an HTML5 solution is much more appropriate for feature phones and the other smart-phones, which endorses your viewpoint that different users may be accessed using different strategies.

The iPhone was a given all along and has been very successful for our free Mall Maps application, but Android has be pleasantly surprising in terms of overall downloads and friendliness of the user community (boy are they starved for apps!).

As a sign of fragmentation, our iPhone application is available to ALL iPhone and iPod touch users, whereas our Android application is only available to OS version 1.6 and north (30% are left in the dark because the handset OEM still hasn’t provided an upgrade – FRAGMENTATION 101!!!). As much as I’d like for this to get better, the OEM/OS tree trunk and branches are forking often enough for me to believe we’re riding the proverbial fence-line between ubiquity and innovation.

Josh Marti – CTO Point Inside