Pete from Intermorphic on my post on “Why do so many mobile music projects fail? “
Hi!
Pete here from intermorphic.
The comments you’re looking for are here: http://intermorphic.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=61
Reproduced below… the problem still stand, hence we’re still focused on creating generative tools for desktop. 🙂 If the market ever changes, then sure we’d look at it again. Hoping this helps! Pete
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You might be interested to hear that I consider it very hard (if not impossible!) to make money out of creating applications for mobile devices. This makes it difficult to justify putting large amounts of effort into investing a lot of time and/or money into creating them. The reasons are many, and include:
– the huge range of mobile platforms and wide range of capabilities and operating systems
– the fact that many devices are closed (and are therefore completely unreachable) or require specially signed applications (and can therefore be prohibitively expensive to support)
– the very fast churn of mobile operating systems that is even faster than in the desktop world
– the low price that consumers are willing to pay for mobile applications; this is despite the very high cost of most of the devices!
– the large margins that need to be lost to the distribution channels
– the huge variety of different display form factors (width/height/colour depth and layout – portrait/landscape)
– the enormous inconsistencies between user interfaces, soft menus, keyboards and touch interaction
– in general, very poor support for real-time debugging of software for mobile devices
– for audio applications: the lack of low-latency device drivers, the lack of MIDI i/o, the fact that few devices offer full-duplex audio (e.g. Symbian!), the lack of any ease of integration with desktop audio software toolchain, lack of support for multithreaded apps in Brew etc. etc.I speak with considerable personal experience of creating mobile audio applications. Smile
Thanks Pete for that. I understand the issues. I just hope that when the Apple iPhone / iPod Touch SDK becomes available it does create a real mobile platform for developers that gives them the stability they need for making real mobile applications without all the issues you’ve described.
