A new round of fragmentation looms. It is something I have been fearing for a while now: that OEM (and carriers) would make use of the open source of the likes of Android and LiMo to produce their very own flavour of apps. So after Vodafone’s 360 announcement (with customized LiMo storefronts, etc), Motorola announced so-called “signature apps” from a number of developers that are all delivered through Motorola’s new “Motoblur” user interface, which
is based on the Google-backed Android platform for mobile systems. Motorola [will] offer an additional SDK for its APIs beyond what is available for Android.
And then it said that
Over a period of time–we’re not there yet–we’ll allow the APIs to be available so people can develop many more applications than we can think of ourselves, but it’ll take us a little bit of time to mature ourselves to a place that we could open up APIs.
Ouch. An additional SDK. Which is not yet there yet. Whilst the Motoblur UI looks actually quite nice, this sounds suspiciously like another round of walled gardens, onerous internal and external QA, fragmentation and pretty much a fall back into the traps of the J2ME uber-customized world where one needs to support hundreds of devices for a commercial roll-out (with the trouble of course being that, all too often, that work meant that it would no longer be commercially very sensible). Oh dear…
It makes one want to call out for a quick advancement of HTML5 with Gears and all, so that one won’t need apps after all. The issue of connectivity and usability, etc would of course still be there. Such despair…
tederf
There will always be fragmentation but there needs to be good tools and fragmention to alleviate a lot of the pain. But you fell into the “onerous internal and external QA” trap – too much crap out there already.
tederf
Sorry had a bad typo — this is what I meant:
There will always be fragmentation but there needs to be good tools and compilers to alleviate a lot of the pain. But you fell into the “onerous internal and external QA” trap – too much crap out there already.
tederf
There will always be fragmentation but there needs to be good tools and fragmention to alleviate a lot of the pain. But you fell into the “onerous internal and external QA” trap – too much crap out there already.
tederf
Sorry had a bad typo — this is what I meant:
There will always be fragmentation but there needs to be good tools and compilers to alleviate a lot of the pain. But you fell into the “onerous internal and external QA” trap – too much crap out there already.
data recovery
I love android phones but never used motorola so cant comment on its features.