An event is happening in the mobile world which is going to make it harder to build RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) that will work on everyone’s mobile device.
iPhone SDK 4.0
This summer Apple will be releasing a new version of the Software Development Kit for the iPhone, which comes with a revised Developer Agreement. This agreement includes new restrictions on what languages developers can use to create Apps for distribution in Apple’s Online Store.
Why is this a big deal?
Online access of the web using mobile devices is steadily increasing, so if you are involved in creating online experiences or your company has an online presence, you should start supporting mobile devices, if you aren’t already. As those devices become more and more capable their users will expect more than a simplistic web page and you will have the opportunity to impress them with richer content.
To economically develop RIAs that can target desktop and mobile devices it’s best to develop it once, with a minimum of the budget spent on tweaking and creating sub-versions for each device. For that to happen we need to have shared standards in the language, APIs (Application Programming Interface) and media rendering on all of the target devices.
Apple’s new Developer Agreement will limit developers to working in an Apple approved language which will only target their mobile devices. There are several languages and applications which will no longer be able to target the iPhone once the new Agreement goes into effect, including Adobe Flash CS5, which launched on April 12th. Flash is a commonly used method for distributing cross-platform RIA, but Apple has never allowed it’s customers to install the plug-in on their devices. Flash CS5 works around this by adding the ability to export a Flash movie as a native Apple mobile App, but under the new Agreement any App created with Flash will be automatically rejected by Apple when it is submitted for distribution on their Online Store.
Solutions..?
What’s an RIA content creator to do? I’ve a few ideas, which I’ll write about in Part 2.