Raining apps: Helping the sleek $500 phone become truly, madly & deeply SMART!!!!!!!!!

What do you feel when your friend is taking you for a drive in Bengaluru, hearing to a sweet lady called siri on the phone, avoiding huge traffic and helping lungs not getting carbonated.. & you imagine you did the same to your own little family somewhere in Hyderabad...but the phone not supporting that application... 

Though I work for a chipset manufacturing company that sells the hardware and software to several OEMs like Samsung, Sony, Fujitsu to name a few, I have little control over what OS they choose (Linux, Windows, z10 etc.,.), what applications and support they want to give to the end customers.

Eventually, I'm one of the customers & hence have very little choice of the applications & depends on the platform on which my phone was made.

I want to see an ideal world where my friend or my enemy's applications install and run easily on my phone irrespective of the platforms. Something like the "AFTER" in the below picture.

To do this, there needs to be a common application framework, that can be run seamlessly on all the platforms & should have associated Software Development Kit (SDK) which needs to be published to application developers and bring in faith & confidence amidst already existing monopolies like Google Android which doesn't want to support and go beyond the native apps. One instance of such framework is the HTML5/Webkit which has it's own latency issues, OEM acceptance. There are a number of challenges and obstacles to break and pass through...

Consolidating that I can think of are:-

 

                                               

A) By providing the cross compiler (android / windows) to app developers, which he can use to provide the libraries.

· This will be good in terms of time will it take to provide the app to market.
· This will increase the size of library of app.

B) By giving option to boot the phone in LA and windows both.

· Provide better way as will not require much testing and bothering about changes, much easier and quick to market, OEM needs to take care here.
· Need to define the HW specification and memory size separately
· Will increase the cost to end user.

C) Write a new framework similar to Webkit but that is more optimized in terms of performance and latency in taking the calls to native layers.

As the memory cost is reducing day by day and processing power increasing as per Moore's law, not more than 2-3 OS monopolizing the industry and becoming a only choices for the customers, option (B) appears to be a viable option. But the customer may not be willing to reboot the phone for additional applications. So (C) is a practical option and needs lot of research.

The number of OS manufacturers, OEMs, end customers & their tastes, recommendations are growing fast... It's the time that I wake-up and act...................