Today our first iPhone game called ”Baby Roulette” was published on the Apple App Store. The whole submission process was really fast. We submitted our app to Apple on Sunday afternoon, it went into review on Monday noon and today (Wednesday) morning it was published on the iTunes Application Store.

The game is very very simple, so maybe that’s one of the factors for a speedy release…
Why did we build an app like this?

Baby Roulette is a really simple and fun game for kids (mostly) to learn animal sounds. Our main intention for building this game is to get a simple and nice looking game quickly in as many App Stores as possible starting with Apple. Our next targets will be the Ovi Store , Android Market and Vodafone 360, which is still running the ”Vodafone 360 App Star Competition”.

We mainly want to gain insights about different application stores regarding users, downloads, major downloading countries, devices and of course we want to practically go through the whole process of building an application/game and releasing and actually selling it on different app stores. This will help us to enlighten our clients and of course we are also blogging about it. So here are some first facts…

We have been planning to organize a local meetup group around the topics of HTML5 and CSS3 for a few months. These topics are necessary to get into for any serious developer in the area of web development. Also mobile developers need to know what’s up with it, especially if they are planning to develop for the iPhone, Android phones or basically any other web-based platform. On top of this talking about experiences and learning from each other is a good way to get into any topic.

Some people were contacted and this past Tuesday the first HTML5 and CSS3 meetup in Frankfurt took place. We managed to gather a small bunch and met at the Lokalbahnhof, a pretty nice restaurant / bar in Sachsenhausen. It turned out to become a very fun evening with good food and a couple of drinks.

HTML5 action was based around an introductory presentation that I was showing:


I was also showing a canvas demo intended to be used for the iPhone - after all we ended up replacing this part of the application with an old-school CSS sprite background animation for performance reasons, which was a learning on its own. Another Demo shown was a GameQuery-based shooter game that uses CSS3 animations to blow up enemy ships - amazing to look at and play - thanks for that Jesse!

There were various discussions about the two technologies. The concept of just sitting together without a real agenda, talking about a wide topic seems to work - I could learn some new things and I am sure the other attendees did too. Thanks to everyone who was there, it was a great evening!

We are now planning to do this monthly (roughly), so we are looking forward to April! If you want to come make sure you are filling out the Doodle poll so we can pick the best date!

At MWC a number of the world’s leading telco companies including Vodafone, Orange, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, Deutsche Telecom, SK Telecom, Verizon, AT&T or China Mobile have announced the formation of an international alliance called ”Wholesale Applications Community” (WAC) - to battle Apple.

They are aiming to build an open platform for mobile apps to all mobile phone users and want to solve the massive fragmentation problem.

They try to develop a common standard for applications within the next 12 months. The WAC is supposed to be a platform NOT an app store.

Of course, the app market is still a lucrative business and growing. Analysts at Gardner predict that the number of app downloads will rise to 4.5 billion (from 2.5 billion last year), yielding almost $30bn.

So far so good. But what does that mean, especially for us developers? Is this the right approach in the ”write once, run anywhere” direction?

The good thing is that the group intends to use existing open standards (JIL, BONDI, W3C) and that will make it a lot easier for developers creating apps across multiple platforms. Besides developers then have only one single gateway to access a vast potential and international customer base. It also saves a lot of time and resources. And the new alliance has access to more than three billion customers.

Well, does this sound too perfect to you? There are still a lot of questions and even doubts, right?

Some more interesting news announced at the Mobile Word Congress:

• Google’s new strategy “Mobile First”
  Google’s new strategy: “Mobile First” The company now focuses more on smartphones than on desktops. That means giving mobile top priority and launching new products first on mobile platforms before creating PC versions.
  
  (Source: brighthand.com)

• 60,000 Android phone a day
  Google’s Android launched a year ago and is now available on 26 different devices in 48 countries. 60.000 Android devices running this operating systems are now being sold on a daily basis meaning about5.4 million handsets per quarter, or 21 million per year. Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones last quarter and 25 million in 2009. Seems like Android is gaining ground, hopefully internal fragmentation will be taken care of (if that’s possible).
  
  (Source: mobilegamesblog.com)
  

Instead of a lengthy blog post here is just a wrap-up of quite interesting news announced at the Mobile Word Congress today:

• Symbian joins Open Screen Project
  The Symbian Foundation is joining the Open Screen Project, an industry-wide initiative led by Adobe to enable the Adobe Flash Platform across a broad range of devices. This means that Symbian will be integrating Flash 10.1 in future releases of the platform.
  
  (Sources: allaboutsymbian.com, eon.businesswire.com)

• Ericsson launches eStore
  Today, Ericsson unveiled an application store product for mobile operators allowing them to set up their own application store. The eStore is available in 25 markets worldwide, reaching more than 1 billion subscribers throughout more than 100 operator networks. It already has 30,000 free and paid apps and games. The eStore is backed by Opera who provides the client framework for widgets and applications across multiple channels and devices.
  
  (Sources: mobilegamesblog.com, finchannel.com)
  

At Mobile World Congress 2010, Adobe announced today that it will bring Adobe Air to mobile devices, starting with Android and Blackberry phones.

At the moment you can build desktop web applications with AIR that run outside the browser on multiple operating systems, but soon it will be possible to create Android and Blackberry apps as well. These mobile apps will be able to store data locally on the phone, access other data on the phone such as photos, and be distributed as regular apps in the Android and Blackberry app stores. Not only that, but the same apps created with Flash developer tools will be exportable as iPhone apps (”Packager for iPhones”). The big picture is that developer can create applications once with Adobe’s developer tools and then output them as AIR apps for Android and Blackberry phones, native iPhone apps, or Flash apps on the Web.

Some interesting stats about smart phone sales…

Worldwide sales of smart phones grew 30 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 to 53 million phones, according to researcher Strategy Analytics.

Nokia led market volumes, ahead of Research in Motion (RIM) and Apple, and shipped 20.8 million smart phones during the fourth quarter - up 38% from one year ago.

Last year in October I wrote in a blog post about smart phone applications coming to cars. Today I read an article about Deutsche Telekom and tyre maker Continental joining this market as well.

They plan to put apps into all vehicles via an Android-based on-board computer. The prototype called AutoLinQ will be demonstrated at this year’s Cebit show. Inspired by the iPhone drivers can search for apps, download music, pick up news, check emails and answer them by using voice recording technology. The promise is: all without taking hands off the wheel or eyes off the road!

Deutsche Telekom said in a statement that the core functions of AutoLinQ include an online address book linked to the navigation system. Drivers can type in journey destinations on the computer at home or work before getting in the car, or via their mobile phone when out and about. As the vehicle is connected to Deutsche Telekom’s mobile network, drivers can call up information that tells them where the car is parked, or check whether the sunroof is open and close it remotely using their phone.

After mobile phones and cars we now will be able to access our mobile apps on TV - This really is exciting news:

At CES 2010 in Las Vegas Samsung announced the upcoming availability of of free and paid apps in Samsung’s Apps store, including apps for Televisions, Blu-Ray Players, Home Theater and Mobile Phones. The download service for TVs will be available in July 2010.

I found two interesting videos from Samsung’s press conferences:



I guess other manufacturer will enter the market pretty soon, too. It seems the web is getting more and more ubiquitous…again.
Sources: tv.samsungapps.com www.mirror.co.uk

Bitstream, the company behind the popular BOLT mobile browser, has announced that version 1.7 of its browser will have the ability to run Web applications - known as widgets.

BOLT already supports Ajax, Javascript and other web-based languages. But the widgets will be installed directly into the BOLT browser and thus will load and execute faster. The BOLT widgets are written in standard W3C code. Users can access their widgets from within the browser via a new widget menu.

“As many of the recent mobile and wireless trade shows have demonstrated, mobile applications are part of the mainstream mobile experience,” said Sampo Kaasila, vice president of research and development at Bitstream. “However, the vast majority of phones in use today are ‘feature phones’ not smartphones. Unfortunately for the users of these billions of feature phones, it isn’t easy to find, install and run mobile applications. By adding Web apps to BOLT, Bitstream is not only improving the usability of our mobile browser, we are also making it possible for literally billions of people to partake in the mobile apps revolution.”