Thread: How can we encourage iPhone developers to develop on Maemo?
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Jaffa is offline Jaffa
2009-08-17 , 15:52
Posts: 2,535 | Thanked: 6,681 times | Joined on Mar 2008 @ UK
#94
Originally Posted by fms View Post
This is all meaningless unless you have got a large enough base of consumers ready to buy stuff. Maemo does not have such a base at the moment and I do not see it getting such a customer base in the closest future.
I believe that (from what we've seen) RX-51 will ship more devices than any other prior mobile device: increasingly mainstream user interface and consumers can understand "phone" better than "Internet tablet".
PS: I know how saliva inducing the idea of competing with iPhone is, but if I were to amuse myself with various "Maemo business strategies", I would start with more modest targets:
You're replying to my post, so I'm going to respond as if you were talking to me. I'm under no illusions - Maemo isn't going to compete with the iPhone in the short- or medium-term. If we're lucky we'll get into that second tier with Android and webOS.

I read the subject as "How can we encourage [prospective] iPhone developers to develop on Maemo?". Would this thread make you happier if it was "How can we encourage Android developers to develop on Maemo?" It's still a more developer-successful platform (based on number of apps, ease of getting started and out-of-the-box power of the development environment) than Maemo.

1. Getting support for traditional MIDP Java applications (zillions available on the market right now) in such a way that MIDP apps written for different screen sizes run well on Maemo (with intelligent scaling) and the controls are tolerable.
For someone who rails against Java so much, it's odd to see it put at priority #1 on your list; especially since the #1 smartphone platform (Blackberry) uses a different API to MIDP.

Can we finally leave "why Maemo is not an iPhone" stuff to the few diehard iPhone owners here and move on to something more constructive?
This thread was constructive until people started going off in four separate tangents:
  • Denial: The iPhone isn't successful. It's full of iFart apps. Pfft (no pun intended)
  • Missing the point: iPhone developers are never to going to switch. Maemo has open source developers. They're fine.
  • Political stance: Attracting the type of developer the iPhone has would require us to use DRM and the moment that's on my Nokia, Maemo is dead.
  • Missing the point (2): You can't compete with the iPhone. Shut up. You're being stupid. You should be asking how we can encourage XXX developers to develop on Maemo (where XXX could, say, equal MIDP)
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