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LBS Developers On Symbian And Palm's WebOS: No Thanks

Skyhook Wireless recently polled developers of location-based services and found that less than 10% of them are interested in creating applications for the Symbian and webOS platforms. Can smartphone platforms succeed with such little developer support?

I am a little surprised by these numbers from Skyhook. Symbian, though it is beginning to show its age, is still the world's most prevalent smartphone platform. The Symbian Foundation is hard at work on the next version of its platform, and expect to have it ready for the market later this year. Palm's webOS will hit the market in less than three months when the Pre is released by Sprint. Both will support GPS applications.

According to Skyhook, "Seventy three percent of respondents' applications require exact location. Neighborhood level positioning is required by another 19%. Very few want a broader city- (3%) or country-level (5%) approximation. Similarly, 73% of developers agree that very fast location results are important to their application's performance."

The last point is not debatable. If a phone can't determine location information in under a minute, it pretty much fails in my book. Country- or meto-level positioning is not very helpful, either. Neighborhood positioning works well for returning "local results" for things such as coffee shops. Often, though, exact location is required.

Skyhook's survey didn't include the reasons as to why LBS developers are not interested in Symbian or Palm. Just 8% said they'd port their apps to webOS, and 9% indicated they'd port to Symbian. Those are discouraging figures. Are developers waiting to see if webOS and the new Symbian platform succeed before factoring in plans to support them? If hardware, platform and software don't all come together at about the same time, it may leave early adopters stranded (though Palm's Garnet emulator will help diffuse that a bit).

Skyhook did say developers are highly interested in the iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and J2ME platforms. That makes sense. The iPhone and Android were the first to market with apps stores. The success of the apps stores has been clear, with so many copycat stores being launched by competitors RIM, Microsoft and others. To top it off, a huge number of handsets run Java, making J2ME an obvious choice.

Kate Imbach, director of marketing and developer programs at Skyhook Wireless, said, "Developers are taking advantage of location in a huge variety of apps. As developers make plans for investing in new platforms, location capabilities play a big role in their decision criteria."

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