CHALLENGES OF MOBILE DEVELOPMENT

a Blog by Surya Srinivasan
 

Programming platforms on mobile phones are heavily fragmented and there are lots of surprises that each can throw up. Often you will need multiple versions of your software to support different versions of the same platform on the same phone model. J2ME is the biggest common platform, while others like Windows or BREW also have some market share, and there are others like the iPhone that go their own stylish way too. Mobile programming now is similar to how PC programming used to be in the early days of the PC with every manufacturer providing features using their own customized implementations and you had create 14000 different builds if you wanted to support most of the available hardware.

While J2ME promises the widest distribution, its feature set and UI capabilities are rather limited and it rarely takes advantage of the capabilities of modern smart-phones. It is typical to have a common set of code modules created that are device independent and link them with device specific code modules. This is often needed to provide a good user experience or sometimes even to use the phone’s available features. This creates a challenge in creating a number of device and platform/version specific build processes. It might even require leaving features out of some builds and provide them only on others.

There is a lot of information available on the special limited resource considerations for mobile programming like very little memory, slow processors, unreliability of network connections and so on that I don’t need to repeat here. These restrictions create a need for extensive testing with different scenarios – low battery, phone is charging, poor network signal, data connection is interrupted by a phone call – which require a lot of effort and time.

There are other aspects to mobile development that require careful consideration while planning and estimations. Even simple tasks like opening a browser may involve having to get into special arrangements or code permissions from networks and device manufacturers. It might be useful to keep time aside to develop a quick proof of concept when the application has to access device resources like a Bluetooth network, use the camera, open data ports and pretty much anything aside from straight forward business logic.

The challenges mentioned above are a very small sample, there are many more when user demographics, usage patterns and economics enter the fray.

The Mobile Web is getting more and more real now. There are many websites that track traffic on the web that now arise from mobile phones, the trend is increasing. Mobile development is therefore moving away from writing little games and small utilities that run on mobiles, to becoming full fledged powerful applications. It may not be there yet, but that is the direction.

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