Andreas

see
LBS for £1.79? Vicinity app on the iPhone. What does it say for the Context – location based services business/ revenue model?
http://opengardensblog.futuretext.com/archives/2008/10/lbs_for_179_vic.html

If things start to get free(even LBS type apps) – then it needs a fundamantal rethink .. and I dont have any answers – just the observation that the evidence on Android and iPhone both leans to free mobile apps ..

Having said that, even if an app is £2 and there are 100,000 downloads, it is still a good model for the developer ** assuming ** they get to keep 70%. Thats the really worrying thing re Android – revenue share i.e. if we are talking of free then many of the consideratuons(like fragmentation, support etc) don matter that much! thoughts? kind rgds Ajit

2. Openness for handset OEMs
a. access to read AND modify source code (this has lots of parameters – see West and O’Mahony, 2008)
b. access to hardware boards, for quickly bringing up new devices

3. Openness for network operators
a. ability to request customisation changes, without impacting time-to-market or cost (both are usually impacted, but because OEMs in purpose introduce lengthier TTMs as a negotiation strategy)

Probably 1-2 more aspects which escaped the braindump.. I think this justifies a new post

Andreas

see
Android – iPhone revenue models: Can 70 plus 30 equal free? – Is the future of mobile apps free or fee based?
http://opengardensblog.futuretext.com/archives/2008/09/android_-_iphon.html

So, if you look at the whole pic, then the approach seems to be to provide a Good enough/free app – so no customer support hassles etc.

In that context, it is disappointing since developers wont get anything if it is free .. but Google still gets ad revenue(and I refer to one of your excelent older posts – every element of the Android stack becomes a Web 2.0 element – or something like that ..) i..e we get targetted advertising like Gmail with metadata derieved from every element of the stack ..

A long comment! and late in the night at Hong Kong and gotta go early morning to China .. but hope you find it useful inspite of ite rambling nature! kind rgds Ajit

Good questions.

Fragmentation by design: I meant two things by this:
a) My guess is that Google is counting on diversity (as in biodiversity) for the survival of the fittest stack.
b) simply that Google knows that people can create binary incompatible Androids from the ‘master’ APL2 stack, therefore it’s ‘designed’ for fragmentation.

Dalvik: we won’t know for sure whether Dalvik code will be covered under APL2 until the v1.0 is released in source code form. Mike Jennings did say that Dalvik would be also licensed under APL2, but I ‘m not holding my breath. Dalvik holds the key to binary runtime compatibility.

David,

thanks for the tip on IE6. We ‘ve had compatibility issues with IE6 before, and we ‘ll fix the comments snag asap.

Andreas

PS Opera Mini on my Nokia E61i makes a *much* better job of displaying the comments!

Great article once again. Just had a question on the point about “fragmentation by design”.

When you say “by design”, do you mean Google has intentionally set things up so that fragmentation happens? How would Google benefit from this?

On the other hand, if Google is not hoping for fragmentation, why are they sticking with the Apache license? Why can’t they modify the license such that Dalvik cannot be modified without feeding back into the main code stream?

Please excuse me if my questions are ignorant..

Regards.

I like the title of the article, although frankly, I think the dark side is much darker than that, like Google doing a lot of tracking & pulling data/stats and more — and helping world govts do the same (but don’t all phone co’s do that now anyway???).

While early adopters/buyers will likely be stuck with a closed phone (to some extent) for awhile, the beauty of the ‘net is that most phones get cracked wide open by the world community of disgruntled engineers (aka hackers), and bitTorrent is still around so people can share in the wealth.

While Google is making an open source phone OS with a foolish attempt to keep the marketplace in it’s control, I hope that the ‘real free market’ — hackers (ie freedom fighters), pirates (aka copiers), and bittorrent (aka ‘freedom of speech’ as software) — will eventually re-open things in time.

Some of you may notice I re-interpreted all those names (hackers, pirates, etc). I think we must reclaim our language from the double-think of corp-biased media. The real pirates of 2008 are the corporate CEOs, the political spin artists, the media moguls cutting off freedom of the press, the freelance mercenaries working for the CIA, the drug cartels, the mafia, etc — and it seems like most of those are the SAME people!

WAKEUP and smell the coffee (which is often produced with child labor and slave labor wages in poor countries).

rekzkarz.com
aka Ari