Developers: the best smart phone platform is?
I was talking with Loic Le Meur, CEO and founder of Seesmic, the other night and he was saying that he's running his business by looking at the numbers, not listening to the hype. He told me that the iPhone isn't the only platform out there …
Context & Ripple Effects
The arc here runs straight through the iPhone's developer history: mid-2007 coverage recorded developers shut out entirely (iPhone disappoints mobile developers) while Apple declined to ship an SDK (Why no iPhone SDK?), then June 2008 brought the reversal when the App Store started attracting developers en masse. By November 2009 the question has flipped — the debate is no longer whether developers get access, but whether the iPhone deserves the default slot in their plans.
Scoble's conversation with Loic Le Meur lands differently than a pundit take because Seesmic's own footprint backs it up: the company acquired the AIR-based Twhirl client in April 2008, shipped a free Seesmic for Facebook desktop app in March 2009, added Facebook Pages management to Seesmic Desktop in September, and runs a browser-based Web client — all alongside its mobile builds. A venture-backed client maker (its 2007 round included roughly $5.5 million from Atomico's Zennstrom and Friis) arguing that usage numbers, not hype, should drive platform choice is a data point other developers watch.
First-order effects
- For client developers like Seesmic, platform selection becomes a portfolio-allocation problem measured on real usage — Le Meur's multi-surface shipping record (Twhirl, the Facebook app, Desktop 0.6, Seesmic Web) is the live demonstration that the iPhone need not be the only target.
- Platforms competing with the iPhone get a credible recruiting line: a prominent, funded Twitter-client maker stating plainly that the numbers say the market is bigger than one app store.
Second-order effects
- Competing social clients face pressure to match Seesmic's breadth across desktop, web, and Facebook as well as mobile, since a single-platform client starts to look like concentrated distribution risk.
- Apple's developer-recruitment story — the one that drew the crowd after the 2008 App Store opening — now has to compete against a counter-narrative from inside the developer community itself.
Third-order effects
- If usage data rather than launch-week hype becomes the standard developer scorecard, app-store gravity weakens toward whatever level actual audience share supports, and platform owners' pitches get judged on retention numbers they control less tightly.
- Maintaining parallel clients across phone, desktop, and browser favors teams built around cross-platform runtimes and shared codebases — a structural advantage for shops like Seesmic that began with an AIR-based client.
The trend: Mobile client development is shifting from an iPhone-default bet toward measured multi-platform portfolios, with usage numbers replacing launch hype as the deciding metric.