Monday, February 21, 2011

Developing applications for iPhone Nano might suck

Items of a smaller, more affordable iPhone have circulated since the original iPhone was still in production. There were prototypes of Photoshop and even spec-sheets for the mythical gadgets but rumors seemed to die around the time that Apple started to offer $ 99 last-gen iPhones. For whatever reason, rumblings of an "iPhone Nano" have been cropping up again over the past two days. Here are a few reasons why developers might not be so eager for this device be released.

Fragmentation

One of the biggest annoyances in developing for Android is in writing and testing different hardware capabilities and screen resolutions. This is called fragmentation and iOS from other developers have relatively easy. An iPhone Nano would complicate the development, and some applications simply don't work on a smaller device.

The paradigm of App

One of the most polarizing regarding the iPhone Nano is about stripping out the on-board storage for cloud-based operating system in order to reduce costs. Be able to write native apps offline, is a huge boon for users and proven by billions of downloads of the App Store. To stream applications from the cloud goes against the whole app paradigm we have become so accustomed to. In addition to designing the user interface, the clear advantages of native applications on mobile sites begin to decrease clunky scenario Nano-cloud. I could see this being more reasonable if the Nano had 4 G (and 4 G was largely a marketing ploy at this point). Still no iPod on the subway? Absolutely not.

Data costs

While I'm lucky enough to have been grandfathered into an unlimited data plan from AT&T, new developers might not be so. Tests based on Cloud apps over 3 G would be much more important on an iPhone Nano. This would invariably suck bandwidth, which could inadvertently punish developers very flourishing community of Apple App Store is based on.

On the other hand...

That said, an iPhone Nano might be a good thing if done respectfully users and developers alike. Maybe we'll see a screen with 320 x 480 Nano on board storage is fast mobile data-I wouldn't beat the cloud entirely, but also not rely completely on it. I suspect that the time is not quite right in terms of cost-effectiveness, but then again, as Apple aggressively goes after mass-market appeal of late price with products like Apple TV, this entry may be mature, after all, especially given the heavy subsidisation of service provider. While smartphone sales continue to increase, they are still only about 20% of phones purchased and I'm sure Apple has intention to change the situation.

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