Coversheet of US 7,751,431.

There is one type of junk mail I don’t mind seeing in my postal inbox.  Whenever the US Patent Office grants a patent, all kinds of opportunists from the awards, personalization, and engraving industry spam the inventors with offers of beautiful plaques engraved with the patent’s front page.

I was happy to experience this junk mail avalanche once again this past summer when US 7,751,431 was granted.  This patent covered work I did with my Motorola colleagues Jim Ferrans and Mike Pearce back in 2004.   Back then we were studying distributed multimodal architectures.  More specifically, we were looking for ways to integrate a speech recognition modality into applications running on mobile handsets, where the speech recognition was resident in the network.  This is one of several approaches we came up with.

On a related topic, not so long ago Jim Ferrans and I published a book chapter in which we survey a wide variety of issues and findings  that resulted from our foray into mobile application architectures with network-based speech recognition modalities.  The book itself is rather pricey, but happily you can download a copy of our chapter for free from Motorola’s technical publications site.

Google Latitude is available on your iPhone via Safari (e.g. a web app) and not as a native app. The browser requests the user for permission to access the phone's location API.

This morning I came across this interesting and well-written article on the current state of affairs with regard to mobile app stores.   I think the author’s forward looking comments are reasonable if you limit your outlook to a year or two,  but there are a couple of things to consider with regard to app stores in the long term.  First,  the common presupposition made is that app stores will remain a relevant if not primary way users obtain apps for their phone.   From a purely technical perspective  I would suggest we should not ignore the possibility that rich Internet apps eventually begin to displace the need for native app installs, and eventually the need for mobile app stores.  As HTML5 continues to evolve and the underlying mobile platform becomes more accessible to web app developers, what advantage is there in downloading an app, especially when the data seems to suggest that mobile app retention rates are surprising low (25% on average!)?  It seems to me that web-based apps make perfect sense for a very large number of mobile apps that today are typically one-shots from the end user perspective.  Here at MASL our students have already built some very clever iPhone apps entirely in Safari.  Once a shortcut is added to the home screen it is indeed very difficult for the average user to discern whether or not its a native app or a web app. (We intend to do the equivalent of a “Pepsi Challenge” to actually measure this – look for more details in the future.)    Google Latitude on the iPhone is an early example of using the browser as an alternative to iTunes App Store.

That brings us to our second  point.   From a commercial perspective, Google is shaping up to becoming a pivotal stakeholder in the future mobile application ecosystem.   As I pointed out a while back, its raining Androids this Fall.  (For a much more up-to-date and complete listing of confirmed and rumored Android devices see the list that TechCrunch recently compiled.)  Every Android device I’ve used to-date requires you to become a Google citizen (you need to authenticate with a Google account or create one if you don’t have one) before you can use the device, and from that point on your mobile device is very tightly integrated with the Google cloud, and all the data and services you know and love (email, calendar, maps, search, etc.) are accessible from your mobile without the user installing anything.  It makes perfect sense for Google to gradually nudge the mobile application ecosystem towards a model in which the browser is the primary vehicle for third party application providers to access and integrate with Google services and data in the cloud. This also makes a lot of sense for the end user given the current app usage patterns and in the end seems to raise some interesting questions about the long-term viability of the mobile app store model.

I saw a couple of interesting videos this week that are worth taking a look at. The first one is about testing mobile application. So if you have an app that targets a multiplicity of handsets, all with different form factors, technical specs, and service providers, how can you go about testing your apps? Its simply not feasible to acquire all the phones you need to test on, and even if you could you’d still have to worry about setting up service plans, etc. Worse yet, perhaps you’re targeting a non-local market and want to test your app abroad on a particular carrier, etc.

The MOTODEV guys recently interviewed David Marsyla of DeviceAnywhere.com. David’s company offers the “ultimate mobile application testing platform”. Basically they have a network of over 2000 shared devices world-wide that they make accessible to developers via remote access. So in theory you could test your app on any device, on networks anywhere in the world without leaving your desk.

The second video was posted by Engadget and involves stress testing the actual mobile phones themselves. The video is footage they took in Nokia’s product test lab in California.  You’ll see them inflicting all kinds of serious misuse on the devices using an interesting array of robotic technology and other test apparatuses in an attempt to simulate the sorts of misuse you all inflict on your phones over the course of time. Makes for an interesting video.

The full engadget posting is here.

MASL is located in C2-217 (second floor of Mackinac Hall in the CIS office suite)

The Mobile Applications and Services Lab recently held its first research group meeting at GVSU’s School of Computing and Information Systems.  In addition to myself, the group currently consists of five CIS graduate students and two undergraduate researchers. A variety of topics were discussed at the initial meeting, and perhaps most importantly we discussed our mission statement.  We expect this will be subject to some refinement in the months ahead, but this is how it reads at the moment:

“The Mobile Applications and Services Laboratory aims to combine emerging mobile technologies, social media, and pervasive network services in ways that effectively enhance the lives of real people and the communities within which they work, play, and socialize.”

The MASL Research Group meets weekly on Wednesday afternoons to discuss ongoing research projects.

We also discussed a vision statement with regard to who/what we want to become as we successfully execute our mission.

“By contributing original research results, enhanced educational experiences, and entrepreneurial opportunities, MASL aims to become established as a recognized center of excellence in mobile technology, within the GVSU community, the State of Michigan, and beyond.”

Our dedicated laboratory facility is located in C2-217 Mackinac Hall, and consists of new iMac and Dell workstations and a stash of new mobile devices.   There’s been a flurry of activity here in the past couple of weeks as students have begun working on various projects.  A lot of effort has also been put into getting our development environment in place (Thanks John!!)

The "black box" on wheels is the MASL "toy box" - our stash of mobile devices.

In the months ahead we hope to post details of our progress here on this page.  In the meantime, we’re interested in hearing from you, whether you are part of the GVSU community or beyond.   Do drop us a line.

MASL researcher John Spencer leads a discussion on iPhone development at a weekly group meeting.

Recently I was speaking with a person who is managing a fairly sizable team of developers that is creating a mobile application.  They anticipate seeing the application launched within the USA in around six months or so. The person explained to me that their biggest challenge to-date is coding for and testing various Java ME versions of their client app which must run on hundreds of different handsets, all with different form factors, and on a variety of different operator networks.  When I asked why they were spending so much energy on their Java ME client the response was that their customer required the client to run on 80% of the handsets in use by consumers today.

If I were in their position, I’d spend more time and energy convincing my customer of the reality that is upon us and leave the Java ME slogging to my competitors.   The mobile application landscape has and will continue to change rapidly in the months ahead, thanks to strong growth and innovation in the smartphone category.   A recently published Gartner study reports that in 2Q09 the overall handset market declined 6.1% while the smartphone category increased by 27%.  If you are currently developing a mobile application or soon will be, here are 7 future proof assumptions that I think you can safely make.

1. You will stop porting and start creating. Moving forward, there will be a small number of highly portable mobile application platforms that really matter, and likely a few more that will be mostly irrelevant except for limited niche audiences.  Its somewhat early to forecast who all will be in which category, but it is likely that the iPhone and Android will be in the former.  From the application developer’s perspective, the good news is that gone are the days in which deploying your app meant building hundreds of different binary Java ME jars and testing them on myriad devices.  There will always be some porting or supporting of multiple app clients (e.g. an iPhone version and an Android version) but in general,  a small number of builds will cover large swaths of your intended audience. Not only does this mean you have a crack at launching a successful mobile application, it also means you will be able to spend a lot more time and $$ in the future on innovating and creating compelling mobile application experiences. The mobile application revolution is just beginning.

2. Your users will have unlimited data plans. Even if you did have a magical “porting machine” that could generate binaries for the vast majority of the legacy mobile devices still in use, you would still face a huge hurdle in that most users of such devices do not have data plans in which they can affordably download and use an application that requires network data services.  In the smartphone category, at least here in the USA the situation is quite different.  Many smartphones are purchased under contracts that require a mandatory data plan.   In addition, many of these phones also support WiFi which the user can take advantage of in addition to the wide area mobile network.

3. The mobile application gatekeepers will be around for a while, but they’re fairly broadminded. Even though it is gated, the Apple iPhone application ecosystem is a “sneak preview” if you will of how easy it will be to distribute mobile apps moving forward.  While Apple’s rejection of apps due to “objectionable content” tends to get a lot of media attention, the amazing number of apps in the store at present and the billion downloads seems evidence enough that its not all that difficult to make your mobile application available on the iPhone.    The gates for getting and keeping an Android application in the  Android Market are even lower. Nevermind for now the fact that the iPhone App Store currently sells 250 apps for every app sold in the Android Market!   Eventually these  gates will disappear altogether, but we’ll save that for point 5 below.

4. The user interface bottleneck on the mobile has all but disappeared. The mobile application UI was painful until the arrival of the iPhone.  Now things have changed dramatically.  The iPhone has proved that a mobile app can actually be a pleasure to interact with. Mobile app creators can safely assume that their target devices will have nice high res color display, an easy to use touchscreen interface with either a QWERTY keypad or soft keypad that makes text entry relatively painless, at least when compared to the multi-tap entry of the past.  Additional hardware features such as accelerometers and locative technologies can also be used to improve the user interface in innovative ways.   It seems that successful mobile speech interfaces will remain effective for the time being, only in tightly integrated application experiences, such as Google Mobile for the iPhone.  The technology and standards required for introducing an integrated distributed speech recognition modality as a generalized application service are just beginning to emerge.

Demo of the speech modality in Google Mobile for iPhone.

5. Rich Internet applications will eventually triumph over native installed mobile apps.  There are a couple of  factors to consider here.  First, the WebKit foundation all up and coming mobile web browsers (iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, etc.)  have in common should not hurt when it comes to writing web apps that run well on the devices that matter.  Second, a raft of new RIA inspired features coming in HTML5 should go far in helping you write web apps that look and feel like native installed apps.  To get a glimpse of what’s coming down the pipe in HTML5 be sure to watch some of the 2009 Google IO presentations.  To be clear, native apps are still important today, and you may very well have to create iPhone/Android apps to kick start your mobile app franchise in the near future.  However, we believe these emerging developments will eventually create a situation in which the complications of authoring and deploying native applications are supplanted by rich Internet apps that really do run everywhere with minimal effort.   Companies such as Appcelerator are already pushing the envelope in this area, and we expect to see a lot activity moving in this direction.

Google IO talk on HTML5.

Appcelerator talks about their Titanium platform.

6. De facto exploitation of features that for the most part uniquely belong to mobile. By default your users will expect their apps to fully exploit the unique capabilities of the mobile phone. The mobile phone was a communication tool long before it morphed into a general purpose application platform.   Moving forward people will expect mobile applications to incorporate communication and social media features.   They will expect to be able to leverage their social graph in a meaningful way in any mobile context they happen to find themselves.  In addition, users will expect the context sensing equipment (camera, location, audio, etc.) that is now standard on virtually all smartphones to be utilized by their applications.   Locative app features will abound and be standard fare in mobile apps moving forward.

7. Battery life will continue to be a problem for your users. All of this good stuff does not come for free.  Those bright screens, multiple radios, etc. will very quickly take their toll on today’s portable energy solutions.  Instead of charging their phones up every 36 hours, users will find themselves charging up every 8 hours!  Developers need to be conscious of this and develop their applications accordingly.