Rivalry in tech market to hurt communication

In the world of mobile phone applications, Apple, Google, Nokia and their competitors seem to have only their differences in common.

Most mobile software works on only one type of device or the phones of one carrier.

An iPhone application will not work on a Nokia phone, and neither would work on Google’s Android system or Microsoft’s new Windows Phone.

The state of play, experts say, is a cacophony of incompatible software that threatens to slow the growth of the mobile Internet. Companies in this field that are attending the Mobile World Congress this week are holding sessions to educate software developers on the idiosyncrasies of designing apps for their phones.

“These are all proprietary systems,” said Michael O’Hara, chief marketing officer of the GSM Association, the London organiser of the Barcelona event. “We are creating islands of applications out there that can’t communicate with each other.”

The competition is similar to what happened in the earliest days of the personal computer industry, when a programme bought for, say, a Commodore 64 would not work on a Texas Instruments PC.

Microsoft eventually came to dominate the market for PC operating systems, prompting armies of programmers to write software for Windows machines.

But on the desktop, operating systems have become less important in recent years as more computing has moved to the Internet, which is built around open standards.

In the mobile world, the operating system market is fractured, and the mobile Web is not yet developed enough to handle many things people want to do on mobile devices.

Meanwhile, Apple’s iPhone and its App Store have turned the once-obscure field of mobile applications into a lucrative market, prompting other companies to mimic that model.

Last year, $4.2 billion in mobile applications were sold, almost all of those iPhone applications, according to figures compiled by the research firm Gartner.

After splitting the revenue with developers, Apple pocketed an estimated $1 billion in 2009.

With sales of mobile applications expected to rise 62 per cent this year, to $6.8 billion, according to Gartner, Apple’s rivals are working to grab a piece of the pie.

Nokia, the leading cell phone maker, said consumers were downloading more than one million applications a day from its Ovi service.

Google, Samsung, LG and Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, have all reported strong traffic at their application stores.