I've just read this article "Apps call, but will your phone answer" in MSNBC.com’s coverage of last week’s CES conference.  It's a topic which everyone here at Crisp is keenly aware off.  This article clearly makes the point that apps work on some phones, but not all. However, in reality the fragmentation issue of app incompatibility is significantly worse than portrayed in that article.  It has been around for a long time and isn’t getting any better because there really isn’t any unifying technology that is making much headway. 

While industry giants like Google prefer standards, software developers have a self-interest in pursuing new technologies.  To compare, one would easily assume it would be better and easier for auto parts manufacturers and car mechanics if everyone drove a car similar engine technology.  But the days of the Model-T are over.  This is a mature marketplace with (too) many types of cars that are still relatively expensive and increasingly diverse.  

Software developers, just like auto mechanics, benefit from the hard-to-achieve and broad skill set they’ve nurtured after years of building apps on multiple platforms.  Recent mobile software platform initiatives such as LiMo, Maemo, Bada, WebOS prove that there are plenty of people who don’t think that Windows Mobile, Palm, RIM, Android, BREW, Java ME, and Apple have done enough to complicate matters for developers and content publishers.

Google and most of the mobile advertising industry sees this fragmentation as a big problem.  Hence, there is much promotion on Google's part for HTML5 technology.  Without having too many delusions about its imminent success, Crisp loves to embrace HTML5, Flash, Javascript and other means to improve compatibility and simplification.  At Crisp, we always try to solve the fragmentation challenge instead of splitting efforts by re-writing the same functionality in many different programming environments.

Still, educating content publishers and advertisers that device fragmentation (app incompatibility) is a large problem, has been around for a long time and remains the important truth.  Acknowledging the problems while offering solutions to simplify the complexity for them has been one of the tactics Crisp employs to do business in mobile.  If you’d like to hear about how we do it, don't hesitate to contact me, or any other mobile veteran here at Crisp Wireless.