Challenges for mobile application development

Mobile communication has been dominated by vertically integrated service provision in an ‘operator centric model’, which has been highly bound to voice and SMS services and organized in a monopolistic competition between few Mobile network operators, MVNOs and SPs. In the recent years we have witnessed a radical change driven by the introduction and further development of smartphones, where we see emergence of new business models, including ‘device centric models’, where the user can get access to new applications and services by connecting to the device manufacturers' app stores and the like. One of the main drivers of this change is the advanced capabilities of the smartphones enabling the mobile devices to reap the advantages of the convergence process and bring advanced internet applications and services to the mobile devices. However, the device market is dominated by a number of different technological platforms, including different Operating Systems (OS) and ‘software development platforms’, resulting in a variety of different competing solutions on the market driven by different actors. The aim of this paper is to give a comparative analysis of these technological platforms and identify their strengths and weaknesses seen from user and market perspective.