MWC 2013 - Developer's View

In the recent Mobile World Congress I joined two sessions intended for application developers. In the OneAPI App Developer Conference both GSMA and representatives of big industry players unveiled their view on web-based ecosystems. Next, I joined the Samsung Developer Day where new APIs were presented from a high-level perspective. Despite a strong marketing overtone of both events, I found some of the presentations enjoyable and informative. Here is a brief summary.

 OpenAPI App Developer Conference

 Developer Garden project caters for an easy integration with Deutsche Telekom APIs. That opens up a variety of exciting options, one could talk to a vendor machine to get a candy or boost their business by enhanced payment, location and other network or communication services. I like the idea of App Monitor, a feature which helps pinpoint performance and stability issues on the (fragmented) Android platform. 

It's a bit hard to read, but basically it says: simple, cheap and flexible.

Brian Mulloy from Apigee, armed with "I Love API" stickers, gave a passionate speech on the importance of APIs. Trigger.io was mentioned in connection with smooth application prototyping. It allows for easy deployments onto mobile devices. Trigger.io Forge is a development framework of the same nature as PhoneGap but claims to be better.
I love API. How about you?

 Next, Chris Smith walked us through the challenges Financial Times have faced when adjusting their website to mobile devices. I found it interesting to hear about how they tried to close performance gap between the web and the native code. FT blogs about their custom libraries Scroller, Column Flow and Fast Click.
In fact, there were many ..

 Finally, Ubuntu announced the Touch Developer Preview on mobile phones and tablets. The alpha version of SDK was released on 21 February. Further, Qt /cute/ was presented as an easy, convenient and powerful framework for building mobile apps. Long story short, with Qt one can build both web and native apps and, for the first time ever, it is possible to build and deploy PhoneGap hybrid apps on Ubuntu. Even though HTML5 is obviously the right way to go: "the distinction of what the native apps can do and the web apps can't, that's something we would like to stop".
Web apps everywhere, one day PhoneGap is gone ..

Samsung Developer Day

 Samsung Wallet API is all about boarding passes, coupons or membership cards obtained easily in a ticketless way via a mobile device. The API enables to create custom templates and push notifications based on user location and time. At the moment, the API is available to selected Samsung partners only but it should become publicly accessible in May. An access key is required in order to use the API.


From the demo: A boarding pass via the Samsung Wallet

Selected partners only ..

The introduction into the AllShare Framework was, in my opinion, the best part of the day. An attractive demo, followed by thorough explanations of the core concepts spiced up by code examples was exactly the kind of presentation I hoped for. The AllShare technology itself was on display at CES 2012 - I found a nice hands-on review which is close to what was presented in Barcelona too. Without getting too deep into details, I am giving just a few highlights:

From the AllShare demo ..

As a developer I appreciate the smart TV simulator.

TV simulator in action.

 Samsung developer program is open to a broad audience, no one should feel excluded, not even those who have no access to any of the latest Samsung devices. Remote Test Lab enables to test on real devices, not emulators (!), via the Internet 24 hours a day, all year round. I have to say I felt a bit disappointed after I had tried it out. No support for Mac OS and I was not able to use any of the virtual devices I had been charged for (4 points out of the initial 20). All load attempts failed.

One of those days ..

16 out of 20 left and no luck so far. Shall I keep trying?

To finish on a positive note, Samsung's booth was not only one of the biggest I saw in the exhibition (I skipped some of the halls though), but there was also plenty to see and try out. Hope you will enjoy the final bunch of pictures.