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Apr. 10, 2009

According to a survey conducted by Skyhook Wireless, some mobile developers of location-aware applications apparently don't want to develop mobile applications for the Palm WebOS or Symbian operating systems.

Skyhook's report reveals that despite Palm and Nokia’s best efforts to lure developers with the Pre and Web OS and Nokia’s Ovi Store, very few developers intend to port to these platforms.

The survey also found that the respondents’ primary application development environments included iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, J2ME and Symbian.

While Symbian remains a strong source of application innovation in general, the survey also found that those mobile developers wishing to create location-aware applications (GPS) are staying away from that platform.

The Skyhook report notes that only a few years ago, location was most widely used in navigation applications. But today developers are implementing location in an increasingly varied set of situations. The report cites developers using location in 21 different types of applications, ranging from education to entertainment, finance and music.

Skyhook's report also looked at the level of accuracy required by developers. Seventy-three percent of respondents' applications require exact location.

Neighborhood level positioning is required by another 19 percent. Very few want a broader city (3 percent) or country-level (5 percent) approximation.

About 56.2 percent of respondents will port their applications to other platforms. About 57.9 percent of non-Android developers plan to port to that platform, while 40 percent of non-iPhone developers plan to port their application to the iPhone.

But regardless of which OS the mobile developer chooses, consistent accuracy may be a few years off. The accuracy of phone-based location technologies has suffered due to an array of challenges, including urban clutter and GPS satellite availability.

Most mobile apps use back-up technologies such as Wi-Fi triangulation and Assisted-GPS (AGPS) when pure GPS fails. But those technologies can be significantly less accurate as a result.

About 73 percent of developers agree that very fast GPS location results are important to their application's performance.

Kate Imbach, director of marketing at Skyhook Wireless says "as mobile developers make plans for investing in new platforms, location capabilities play a big role in their decision criteria."

Nigel Wright, v.p. of wireless product marketing for Spirent Communications says “there’s been a fair amount of disappointment in the performance of these GPS location technologies, particularly in the more challenging environments.”

Spirent is involved in the development of wireless industry standards to increase the accuracy of the LBS and A-GPS technologies.

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Source: Skyhook Wireless.