Usually the first question that one has to answer when you go into a market for a new tablet or smartphone is whether you want an IOS device or Android device or WP8 device. As it stands today IOS and Android are neck to neck in terms of total apps on their app stores, with IOS holding the quality advantage atleast in Tablet space. And despite the most refreshing and innovative interface, Windows Phone 8 is not able to pick up market share due to a lagging app eco-system (in terms of quality as well as quantity) compared to the other two ecosystems. Once in a while we hear mumurs of Tizen OS or Firefox OS or Ubuntu for Phones and so on. But is the mobile OS the big deal ?
Two-thirds of the world today does not have access to the Internet. And studies are indicating that the younger generation as well as newcomers are coming to ithe internet not from the PC Desktop Browser route but from the smartphone side. The so called new-citizens are first exposed to the Internet not to the browser (anyways smartphone browsing is hardly a pleasing experience), but from Apps like Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Viber, Gmail, Google Maps, Youtube, Tumblr and so on. This has profound implications. Any Internet based service is forced to have a mobile app. And these new netizens are first going to esnure that they have the apps, and the apps are full functioned, before they decide to buy any device with a particular OS. And therefore it is most important that the best App experience is created on an OS for it to stand any chance of gettting traction in the market. Having the most popular apps will not guarantee that people will buy your device (here other factors come into play), but its absence will surely ensure that they won't buy it.
Apple has its nose firmly ahead in this game. The only thing they need to is be more open (give user the freedom but without comprimising security) by way of how apps can share data, increase RAM to handle the very increasing background apps, do away with 16 GB storage (since they do not provide SD Card expansion). I wish to see some of this in IOS 8 and the coming generation of devices (Air 2 and Iphone 6). For Android, the challenge is to somehow bring app quality Parity with IOS (especially for tablets) and control the background processing of apps in a unified way like IOS. Also the accessory support ecosystem must be improved. As for WP8, they first need to get the popular apps and with similar feature set on their App Store.
Its a huge challenge (cost, effort, focus) for app developers to develop three versions of the applications simultaneously for three platforms with the same feature set and similar quality of experience. No developer would want a fourth OS to spring up and would rather have 1/2 of the existing ones to die out. This is a complete innovation anti-pattern. And the big platform OS players may have a vested interested in letting thing stay this way as kit kills competition. If someone could level the playing field by ensuring that Web Technologies (HTML, Javascript, etc) or something similar could be used as common platform for developing apps which are as powerful, functional, smooth and good looking as Native apps, then they the duopoly of Android and IOS could be broken. It would involve developing & opening up a lot of infrastructure technologies (both hardware and software) for everyone to adopt. even if developers could write the app in common language and tools could compile and generate native code for multiple OS (and load it into seperate app stores) it would be a welcome change. We don't want a fourth app developing system, we want a common one.
This should also be a possible focus area for people who want to debut new OSs like Tizen, Firefox OS, etc. Otherwise they will end up like Microsoft with WP8 and we all know that Microsoft is well funded to run so long and others may not be as resourceful. If they can't solve the app puzzle from the beginning, they should give up right now.
