A lot of times it’s tricky to get real information about a platform. The folks who really understand the internals have a vested interest in seeing the platform succeed in market, and they’re concerned with their relationship with the platform provider. Lots of developer programs are actually run by marketing departments, so they can do a really good job of tempting folks to a platform. And unfortunately there isn’t always someone there to call bullshit and save independent developers from dumping their time into a lost cause. That doesn’t really seem fair at all. Thought it might not seem like it I am actually sorry to harsh on B&N. I’m sure there are some good folks over there who genuinely want to make the world better. But as it turns out I feel way more obligation to the developer community than I do to a retail outlet.

The way this actually started out was my curiosity about what application distribution numbers on the Nook devices would look like. I have visibility into stats from lots of different apps across different platforms, devices, and markets. But I had absolutely no info about the Nook. I do however have a few super simple testing apps sitting around, and some of them are already Android versions. So I thought: “How about I just package up one of the Android ones and release it for the Nook just to get myself some numbers?” Seemed like a simple enough proposition. So I grabbed myself a Nook Color and checked to make sure the stuff I was thinking about releasing wasn’t an exact clone of something already in the market. Nope, it wasn’t.

My first tip off that things weren’t going to he happy shiny in Nookville was the signup process. Just in order to signup as a Nook developer there was a really detailed set of questions to fill out. It was free though, so I just wrote the process off as them being hungry for information about their developers. And I was approved within the timeframe they predicted (I forget how long, important thing is that it wasn’t a surprise). It’s all Android stuff, which I’m pretty comfortable with. So despite some hiccups with their developer mode activation and this completely oddball multibutton process they have for launching sideloaded apps, it only took me an afternoon to get an app together, tested on the actual hardware, packaged up, and ready to go. That’s where it went all sideways.

When I first went in to check on the binary uploader it said I couldn’t upload anything cause my account was pending. I assumed that was just a quirk of creating a new developer account. But as it turns out it was cause I had to enter detailed user account and banking info, even after the details from the initial signup, and even though I only at this point wanted to distribute a free app. So I filled out the details and submitted them. And waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually I started up a support ticket to try to figure out what went wrong (screenshot of an excerpt below). As of right now it’s been a month since I started trying to get my app out, and the support ticket has been open for 24 days. Apparently there’s actually nothing wrong with my info. They just can’t get their systems working.

I’m just assuming at this point that my account is never going to get approved, and that B&N is just going to shut down their Nook experiment well before they get around to clearing up the developer account queue. So just keep this in mind when you’re thinking it sucks having to deal with Apple or Google: at least those systems work.

Since I wasn’t able to actually get an app released I don’t have any hard numbers to share. But there were a bunch of really obvious shortcomings in poking through what was there if you’re planning to build a business. It’s possible that these shortcomings are undone by the power B&N has in marketing your app. They really tout their physical world presence, and their ability to feature apps in-store in addition to on the device. They could be right about that making a difference. They also have an audience that skews female, which could be really interesting if you were able to get an app released. But I suspect the winners on the Nook platform are going to be the ones that have a strong brand already, with “must have” apps getting put in front of a new audience for the first time.

In terms of obvious problems, in giving up the Marketplace you also give up in-app purchase. So the model that almost everyone has adopted to make a profit on the dominant platforms isn’t going to apply if you want to develop for the Nook. It’s paid distribution and thats it. Another glaringly obvious missing feature is remote push notification. You can always hack this in with a background thread polling for updates the way we did pre-Froyo. I haven’t tried that, but I assume it works. It might not really be an issue however. The business reason for drawing users back to an app in terms of revenue model is to expose them to advertising (hopefully not your MAIN reason for drawing them back, but that’s a whole other discussion). However, cause Nook is a closed system that doesn’t allow for promotions for services outside of the Nook marketplace, I assume you’re not going to be able to run any of the existing in-app advertising solutions. Maybe you could run mobile web ads only?

So as far as I can tell this isn’t going to be a winning platform for the average mobile dev. It’s probably a profitable distribution strategy for folks who have a lot of recognition and are looking to get maximum coverage – like Rovio. But most of us are not Rovio.

What about the obvious final question: what about your Nook Color Miker, do you actually like it? Well, now that it’s running Cyanogenmod 7.1 instead of the stock firmware, why yes, I do like it! I’ve been running CM from the SD card, which makes it easy to swap back to booting stock. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be flashing the rom to internal memory though, since I see no reason to boot back to stock any more.

UPDATE: Looks like there are a bunch of issues, and they might even spin off the Nook business unit.

NFC as it stands is setup to suffer from exactly the same set of issues that has effectively killed Bluetooth as everything except a wire replacement protocol. The problem is that when NFC pushers say that NFC is “about more than just replacing your credit card with your phone” what they really mean is that NFC could be about more than just replacing a credit card. The decision about how capable or restricted an NFC stack is lies with the equipment manufacturer. And generally speaking folks don’t just toss random features into phones because they’re available. They do so when it’s really necessary, normally because of consumer demand.

Right now the NFC field is going through something very similar to what the GPS world went through. I’m sure some of you will remember that back in the deep dark recesses of pre-history not every smartphone had a GPS chipset in it. Those of us geeky enough to care went out of our way to find the models that did have GPS support so that we could play around with our own little hacks. But back in those days the consumer public didn’t really care about GPS support in phones. Back in those days the only folks who were clamoring for GPS support in every handset were the folks who were selling navigation or mapping apps for phones, and they were charging way too much, and not sharing revenues back with the manufacturers. So the environment was pretty well jammed up.

Eventually Google Maps came around though. And a meaningful free mapping application with fantastic search changed the potential value of having a GPS chipset in a handset, made the handset more attractive to customers across the board, resulted in more sales for handsets with GPS even if the manufacturer couldn’t sell additional GPS related apps, and we ended up where we are today. Generally that pattern is true, to get a new technology out into peoples hands there has to be a killer application to drive it. And the version of the technology that gets deployed will be the minimum version required in order to make that kill application work, and that ends up being the new standard.

Contrast the GPS uptake with the way Bluetooth has worked out. The Bluetooth technology folks early on used examples ranging from the headset connection version everyone knows through syncing all your data between devices automatically. There’s a whole ton of potential functionality in the Bluetooth specs, and at this point it probably is possible to sync data wirelessly and automatically in some subset of devices. However, the killer app there was connecting a wireless headset, so that’s all that anyone really uses Bluetooth for these days. And on lots of devices that’s all you can do. I’m sure that statement is going to piss of a whole industry. But tough, it’s true, deal with it.

With NFC the killer application appears to be payments. So my pressing fear is that the version of NFC that gets deployed to the devices out there is going to support the subset of features required to be able to participate in payments, and that’s it. Now, I know, the subset of stuff required to support payments potentially covers a few other areas like being able to scan other styles of tags. While I understand some of the convenience points there from a consumer perspective, there are some massive downsides from the point of view of an independent app developer. MASSIVE! Having a fully functional system requires a new bit of hardware even if I have an NFC enabled phone. That’s a huge barrier to experimentation and uptake for anyone except the folks with deep pockets and long timelines.

I was hoping that after the discussion last night I would find out a few things I was unaware of. I would be able to grab my Nexus S and with some quick bits of hackery potentially do something interesting. While I admit that NFC could potentially deliver some wins for a subset of cases out there, it’s not something that an independent app developer needs to take into consideration when building applications. I’m hoping that things shift somewhat as this evolves, but as it stands I’m taking NFC off my list of stuff to find some time to play around with. I just don’t see any areas in which it’s close enough to being a practical component of mobile development for someone trying to build a new business in mobile. Those of us looking for additional ways to make applications more context aware are going to have to stick with other techniques for now.

The README has info about how to output bookmarks in a form that the shim will understand. This is just initial hackery, not a real project yet. I just figured I would share it cause, well, taking some JSON and syncing it to the default browser bookmarks just seemed like the kind of thing other people might want to play with. If you turn on install from unknown sources you can download my prebuilt binary if you’re not into the whole Android development thing. Who knows, once I clean it up some I might even upload it to the market. There’s more hackery to be done first. Firefox Sync, I’m looking at you.

It’s too bad bookmarklets don’t work too well in the default Android browser otherwise there would be some much more obvious fun to be had.

I have no idea what the overall numbers look like in terms of bottom line for Apple, but I do know the effect than an affiliate program has on developers and media properties. Unwrap the download URLs from sites like 148apps and there’s an affiliate program link sitting in the middle. We made use of the affiliate links at Chomp and another startup effort I worked on before that. What an affiliate program says to developers and site owners is “we care about you helping us promote the good stuff in our store.” I think it’s really greased the wheels for Apple and encouraged quality third party services.

If Google would like to increase the download of paid applications (and when the time comes also start to ramp up in-app purchases) without having to spend all the time and effort directly on revamping the marketplace they should take a look at spinning up an affiliate program. The advertising model works, sure. But the incentives are better aligned to drive the overall health of the system when a publisher is paid on app download and not on ad impression or click.

Here’s an example of fetching the most recent unread messages for an account and writing out the subjects into a text buffer:

ContentResolver cr = getContentResolver();
Cursor unread = cr.query(Uri.parse("content://gmail-ls/conversations/xxxxxx@gmail.com"), null, "label:^u", null, null);
unread.moveToFirst();
int subjectIdx = unread.getColumnIndex("subject");
 
TextView tv = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.buffer);
do {
    String subject = unread.getString(subjectIdx);
    tv.append(subject + "\n");
} while (unread.moveToNext());

Of course, the way I would like this to work is some kind of digital signature. But I’ve lived through enough failed waves of attempts to bootstrap public key cryptography systems (and have the keysigning party trust signatures to prove it!) that I know better than to try something like that. And all it would really accomplish anyway is exchanging my fools errand of looking for a printer where ever I happen to be with a half hour conversation with someone explaining how yes, a digital signature is a signature and can be accepted for legal documents.

So I decided to figure out a way to be compatible with existing process instead, figure out how to take the existing inputs and emit the existing outputs. But without all that messy physical process in between. I was hoping for something that would record a signature of mine and allow me to just cut and paste it into a document. Instead I found some decent PDF editors for the iPad that allow me to open up an existing doc, sign it with my finger on the touchscreen, and just mail it back. There are actually a few out there that are supposed to be dedicated to this function, but I’ve instead settled on the free Paperpad Lite application. It’s free. So at the end of the day, I’ve found myself a replacement for print/sign/fax that thus far has cost me zero dollars. Double w00t!

The dedicated “signature apps” are supposed to do things like allow you to open up other document formats like Office docs, but in my experimentation so far they generally don’t work. Most of the time the doc comes out garbled. So in those cases I resort to bring up the doc in Pages on my Mac and saving it as a PDF myself. When I’m really in a pinch (like I don’t have my laptop with me and I need to get the doc back right away) I normally just request a PDF version instead. Just watch out for asking for a PDF version from your lawyers, probably less expensive to just wait on those ones :-)

The transformation for me has been pretty extreme. Now as long as I have my iPad with me I can return a signed document right away. That’s more like it! Not perfect mind you, I wish I could do it with just my phone and a click, the way it would be with a proper digital signature. But I’ve eliminated hardware, waste, and a number of digital to analog conversions (which always make me sad). I could probably deal with the “other docs” to PDF problem with a set of filesystems triggers on my Mac, some commandline hackery, and Dropbox. Then even with my Air sitting on my desk at home it could still be working for me.

It’s made me think a decent amount about some replacement workflows enabled by devices. It’s not like using phones/mobile tech to replace paper and scanners is something new. Scanr has been around doing the same for a long time, and with companies like Zosh getting snapped up by document management companies I assume others are looking in the same direction. So if it’s been around for a while as an idea, why start caring about it now? I think it’s a combination of image capture capabilities being at the right level, applications being gregarious enough that I don’t have to worry about by digital documents being locked in a silo once I decide to make the transition, and now the availability of touchscreens.

For me this is a usage that finally turned the corner from interesting hack to useful set of services. I regularly use my Android phone as a scanner now using an app called CamScanner, which automatically crops and contrast corrects the image, and will save it directly off to Dropbox for me. It’s made me wonder about that camera that’s supposed to be in the next version of the iPad. The iPad has made a good paper replacement device thus far, but if it can also pull docs in from paper to ease the transition from existing process we could have a genuine enterprise transformation on our hands. Cool stuff.

I’m a developer, so the answer to that question has always been no. Although us developers are pretty much “pure” online interaction – we don’t have a lot of the need for offline interaction that lots of other professions do – everyone just assumes that if you’re going to be a developer you’re going to have a computer system of some kind. What if that wasn’t the case however? What if the knowledge of local conditions or business models trumped the other concerns? What are the tools you could use to get the job done if you had a business opportunity and a mobile phone, and that’s it? These are the kinds of questions that have been dragging me out of bed lately.

I’m a huge Android fan. My main phone right now is a Nexus One. I would actually like to see Android grow into a viable competitor for the iPhone. But there’s this huge glaring dark spot with respect to the number of handsets in the market determining the viability of the platform. If number of handsets out in the market really was the determining factor in the viability of the platform then Nokia would have already won. So obviously, it’s got to be a more complex issue.

So if it’s not number of handsets out in the market what would be the signaling factor, what else do we need to pay attention to? As far as third party developers go, their main set of concerns revolves around their ability to make money off their applications – either through direct sales or by monetizing audience. Right now the iPhone does that far and away better than the Android Marketplace does. Why?

I think a lot of it boils down to consumer disposition. Completely outside of the technology itself, it’s more of a marketing or psychology problem. I’m just not familiar enough with the terminology here to know what to call it. But the iPhone is a consumer pull, and Android is a service provider push. Apple seeded desire for the iPhone with a brilliant marketing campaign, and for the most part folks who get an iPhone genuinely want an iPhone. They know what an iPhone is and they know what they can do with it.

On the other hand, lots of the folks who end up with Android devices didn’t necessarily make a decision to get an Android phone. Snag someone in an elevator some time who has an Android phone and ask them why they got it. Generally they’ll say something like “it’s less expensive than an iPhone” or “I didn’t want to get on AT&T” or “I’m not an Apple person”. It’s not that they went out to explicitly get an Android phone, they just went out to get a good phone that isn’t an iPhone. What got sold to them was an Android phone. There’s a whole other discussion about if carriers are driving Android sales harder cause they’re making more off each Android unit in the field than they are off iPhone.. but lets skip that one for right now.

Because the consumer motivation started out different, their behavior ends up being different. I’m not sure if it’s causality or correlation, but Apple has setup the App Store in a way that it seems to drive a ton more sales than the Marketplace does. I’m not saying that the Android technique isn’t valid. Just that an equal number of Android handsets in the market does not make it on par with iPhone as far as third party developers go.

One of the major themes for 2010 that became apparent as we were putting together the lineup for developer day was the increasing momentum behind the mobile web. A few months ago it was looking like a pretty strong trend, and the last few months have seen even more activity than I expected. The folks at Sencha pulled down a bunch of funding, a formal release of jQuery mobile was posted, and we’ve seen folks like OpenAppMkt take the first steps toward paid distribution of mobile web applications. So I’m happy to say that with the benefit of hindsight, including a lot of mobile web focused content seems even more relevant than it did a few months ago. W00t!

There are probably a few major factors driving the increased attention that the mobile web is getting. There are two that I hear probably most frequently, with about a 50-50 split between them depending who I happen to be talking to. The first is that folks really want to get back onto a release cycle that looks like the web release cycles they’re accustomed to and not the shipped software cycles they’re bound to when working through the app store. Even if they can’t necessarily get everything done exactly the way they want to on the web, having to make a few compromises in terms of functionality is worth it to be able to update your application at will. This seems to be particularly true with folks who are already accustomed to web development, and just assume that iPhone dev will work somewhat the same. What I’ve been surprised by are the number of folks who jump into native mobile dev and only start to realize the problems after they have apps out. Eventually they say something like “Hey, how am I supposed to do A/B testing in an iPhone app?” and the problems start to snowball from there. I’m seeing an increasing number of folks in this category.

The second major driver is the increasing attention folks are paying to Android as a platform. Although tales like Advanced Task Manager has to tell of great revenue number on Android are few and far between, the increasing number of handsets out in market and the evolution of the platform are drawing more and more attention. It’s been true for a while that free apps from major plays will have an Android version to ensure the app provider gets decent coverage of their user base. But recently folks that are shifting significant numbers on iPhone are starting to look at Android as an additional paid distribution channel. Angry Birds testing out the waters of Android with a recent beta release is an excellent example of something we’ll probably see a lot more of. On the paid distribution side a native port is pretty much a necessity. But for folks just coming to market now, especially those looking to monetize through in-app sales or advertising, the mobile web is looking increasingly tempting as a way to go cross platform without having to plan for porting.

If that’s the kind of conversation you’re looking to have, check out the lineup we have for Developer Day this year. If you factor in the “friends” discount it comes out to $88 for the day. I think we’ve served up a fantastic lineup for the cost.

There’s also a Best Practices for Mobile Design event we have going on the evening after the Developer Day. It’s just down the road at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and the schedule starts after the developer day program ends. So if you’re planning to come for developer day, please also join us at Mobile Monday by RSVPing at Eventbrite.

Actually, that’s not strictly true. There is another option. You could, you know, compete. It takes is a few hundred million dollars, awesome user experience designers, pushing the boundary of what handheld hardware can do, writing a platform from the ground up, capturing the imagination of developers, and delivering that solution via a channel that’s struggling with its own identity crisis. Not many folks seem to be taking that route however. Odd…. Plenty of folks willing to piss and moan about it, but just not enough to get people over that hurdle into action.

Why not? Cause the “horrible tyranny” of the app store is something that people have opted into. If the tyranny were really that horrible people would stop buying iPhones. Period. So even though there are a bunch of vocal people whose agendas aren’t served by the current state of the iPhone ecosystem, the only reason that ecosystem has enjoyed the success it has is that it does hit the sweet spot for users. And even the folks who whine the loudest about how horrible the App Store system is usually can’t stand to walk away from a platform that actually serves their needs. Take a wander to one of the Adobe offices at some point and count the number of iPhones you see. Quite a few it turns out.

On the other side of the fence, yes you always get some degree of fragmentation with an open system. But the severity of that fragmentation is a function of how well any one individual branch serves the needs of end users. Once one branch starts doing a fantastic job of serving users well and attracts more users, that starts to attract more developers. More developers means more applications, which gets more users. And as long as the folks behind that one branch can execute well, you get this nice virtuous feedback cycle going. In theory. A good place to see it actually working is the Linux kernel itself. Anyone can fork off major versions if they want to, but generally no one does cause Linus is fantastically good at his job.

However, thus far, Android is not a fantastic place to see it happening. There’s no clear strong front-runner in terms of device manufacturer and sub-version of Android, so it feels like a lot of fragmentation. If one of those versions had 95% of the market however, no one would really care about the “fragmentation”, they would build to the successful version. That’s not up to the developers and manufacturers to mandate however (cause then we would be back to tyranny, right, which is what we’re explicitly trying to avoid), the success of one particular version needs to be chosen by end users. So how do you get to that point. Well, it’ll probably take a few hundred million dollars of backing, awesome user experience and design, top notch hardware, etc…

Over the last three years we’ve finally managed to drag mobile out of the rut its been stuck in for a decade (Okay, Apple dragged the whole ecosystem out of the rut damnit – I personally had little to do with it, though I would have loved to). But now the conversations seem to be cycling back to the same issues that got this thing gridlocked in the first place – channel control and fragmentation. I hope we’re not falling into yet another rut. Maybe whoever ends up buying the smoking remains of Palm can turn that into yet another viable option?

Although I hate to admit it, it might be that mobile just isn’t really ready for genuine evolution yet. There’s a market evolution theory says that initially technological solutions demand a tightly integrated environment so that the end product can be of high enough quality to serve the general public. Then, eventually, the product is good enough that it actually over-serves most of the public. At that point modular solutions and customization are the name of the game, as users mix and match what they want depending on individual needs.

Everything is setup for the next phase of evolution to be possible. Linux and Symbian providing open operating systems, Modu and Bug Labs providing hardware platforms, and folks like DoubleTwist providing a media and device management tool. All the parts are there. In theory we should be in a great position to see the major changes that happened over the past three years to accelerate and continue to roll along. But it’s not happening. Makes me feel all itchy. Like I’m missing something that I shouldn’t be missing.