Cloudy future for widgets and web apps

John C. Tanner
21 Jun 2010
00:00

Further details will have to wait until July, when the official WAC company will be established and its board elected. Raby says WAC will reveal its finalized business model then, followed in September by the SDK, materials and documents for developers. WAC will stage its first developer event two months after that, with the goal of officially opening for business at the next Mobile World Congress in February 2011.

Unanswered questions

Between now and at least July, there remains a number of unanswered questions for developers to puzzle over, such as revenue sharing breakdowns, whether the apps will be distributed via carrier-branded apps storefronts or other means, and how many handset makers will back WAC. Only Samsung, Sony Ericsson and LG are officially onboard. RIM and Sharp have pledged cooperation with WAC, and the OMTP's involvement could bring OMTP member Nokia into the fold as well. The LiMo Foundation is also interested in WAC (via BONDI), which could also bring LiMo associate member Motorola to the table, although Motorola is currently banking its current strategy on Android devices, as is HTC. Apple is widely expected to stay well away.

An even bigger question is just how effective WAC will be at addressing OS fragmentation, since technically it's giving developers yet another platform to target without consolidating any of the existing OS platforms.

Even Raby admits that while web ubiquity "is a core starting point to the write/submit once, deploy/sell everywhere scenario that developers have been asking for a long time," WAC's widget and browser-based apps strategy will complement OS-based apps storefronts rather than replace them.

"A lot of operators actually want Apple to continue offering its App Store, as well as Google and Android Marketplace and others, and end-users also want apps than run natively on their device because of better performance," Raby says. "So we're not mandating a replacement of those stores. But if you look at games, people play console games yet web games are also very popular. So there's room for both."

What WAC is really doing, Raby explains, is giving apps developers greater choice in the types of apps they can create while expanding the range of devices well beyond smartphones.

"If you want to develop an app for the iPhone, you only have two choices at the moment: you follow Apple's rigorous process, or you write a web-based version for Safari and lose the richness you'd get if you write for the device," Raby says. "What we're doing bridges that gap with a third choice: you can use your web assets and still provide a rich experience [with OneAPI], and on a far greater scale."

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