Platform Wars Take Their Toll On Publishers

The battle between mobile platforms continues to heat up and is proving to be problematic for various developers and publishers as they have to make tough decisions about which platforms to develop applications for. With the market being fragmented and some platforms having multiple versions floating around (Android, so to speak), it is becoming increasingly hard for publishers to decide their platform of choice, and most of them are waiting till the market stabilizes. For example, Cheezburger Network, a renowned publisher of humor websites, has decided to go for Windows Phone 8 and has stuck to just one platform because it is hard for a small company to maintain and support apps for multiple platforms. CN chose to pass on the Blackberry 10 OS, probably because the future of the platform is uncertain.

Applications and services for the iPhone are a given because of the uniformity of the platform and developers are assured of revenue if the application is even semi-decent. On the other hand, though Android is supposed to be uniform, hardware manufacturers indulge in vast modifications of the stock Android ROM and each version of Android is different from the other. The delays caused by carrier updates coupled with time taken for modification of the OS by manufacturers means that most phones usually don’t run the latest Android build. In addition to the increasing competition between tablets and smartphones running Android, publishers and developers have to build close to six different versions to ensure all Android devices are supported.

One of the widely accepted solutions to this problem is to use HTML 5, a language that can be used for applications on various platforms and using it can even bypass the strict screening that Apple has for iOS apps. However, the downside is that HTML based applications are not up to the mark and this opinion has been voiced even by the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, who said that using it for Facebook apps was one of the company’s biggest errors of judgment.

When companies have to make a call about platforms like Windows Phone 8 and Blackberry, it comes down to using their best judgment. For example, Cheezburger went with Windows because Microsoft seems to be entirely focused on it but it has considered the possibility that WP8 could go the way of Windows Vista. The uncertainty regarding a platform is always there but waiting might result in loss of much-needed publicity and revenue.