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.

Big network operators are also forging alliances to push their own standards for applications.

But perhaps the most unlikely entrant in the field is Alcatel-Lucent, the maker of network equipment.

More choices

In December, Alcatel-Lucent, based in Paris and New Jersey, began hooking up network operators with software developers and retailers to build mobile applications for multiple networks and operating systems.

More than 50 operators have expressed interest in the program, according to the company, and applications are in development.

In Barcelona on Tuesday, Alcatel-Lucent announced that it was expanding its role as an application broker by setting up a development laboratory based on cloud computing that it called a “sandbox in the sky” to speed development of broader applications.

The company also began an exchange to meld existing applications into new ones, drawing in third-party investors to help finance the creative process.

“We’re in this to help everyone in the application ecosystem make money,” said Johnson Agogbua, who is in charge of the application program at Alcatel-Lucent.

Mobile operators are also organising among themselves, not content to leave the applications game to the phone makers.

Last year four operators with a combined one billion customers — China Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Vodafone and SoftBank Mobile of Japan — formed the Joint Innovation Lab, or JIL, to develop applications for handsets on their networks.

The group has published a specification for a mobile “widget,” a simple type of phone application that displays live updates of limited data, like the current temperature.

LG, Samsung, Research In Motion and Sharp are making phones using the lab’s widget format.

“We believe this will be good ultimately for the consumer because it will give them more choices,” said Peters Suh, the JIL chief executive. “It is also an opportunity for operators to take back the initiative.”

But these alliances, which are proliferating, are also complicating matters.

Common standards

On Monday, 20 operators, including AT&T, Sprint Nextel, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, AmÚrica M¾vil, NTT Docomo of Japan and Bharti Airtel of India, created the Wholesale Applications Community, another group with the aim of developing common standards.

The four operators in JIL also joined, but both efforts will continue to run in parallel, at least for now.

Some question whether close rivals in the United States, like Sprint and AT&T, which pay developers to create applications unique to their networks and phones, will end up using a common standard, which could allow customers to more easily change carriers.