Marmalade Predictions for mobile developers in 2012

2011 was an exciting year for mobile developers and 2012 will no doubt bring more interesting developments in the mobile space.
Here we talk about the key events of 2011 and share some bold predictions for 2012.

Early in 2011 Nokia announced its partnership with Microsoft, sending shockwaves around the world. In November the Lumia 800 phone was released as Nokia's first Windows Phone product. Symbian has gone from clear market leader to impending extinction in the space of a few years.

HP purchased webOS for $1.2 billion in April and only 4 months later started a fire sale of its only webOS product, following with the announcement that webOS would become an open source project. What will become of webOS in 2012?

New platforms are still emerging though, and RIM launched the PlayBook tablet in April, showcasing the new BlackBerry 10 OS and being touted as the future platform for RIM products. Marmalade added support for BlackBerry 10 in our 5.2 release in July.

In August Google announced the planned acquisition of Motorola's phone unit in an attempt to fight off patent lawsuits affecting licensees. Will this be the year that Google starts to take control over the software and hardware in Android devices?

Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 4S in October was met with some disappointment by bloggers and “fan boys” but sales of the phone have been strong and iOS continues to hold on to a strong position in terms of market share. Will that last in 2012?

The much anticipated Kindle Fire went on sale in November with impressive sales statistics. Goldman predicted sales of 6 million devices in the closing two months of 2011 alone. The device is currently only available in the US and is expected to be released in other markets soon. App developers saw a sharp increase in downloads following the launch of the Fire, with one app maker seeing download figures rocket from around 1,000 per day to over 33,000 per day over the Christmas period on the Amazon Appstore.

Flurry have said that developers reached the 10 billion apps barrier with 1 billion downloads per month on the Android platform. That is an incredible number of apps and downloads considering the iPhone was launched just 5 years ago and the Android Market is less than 4 years old.

The rise of "freemium" in 2011 was apparent with half of all revenue in the App Store associated with top 200 grossing App Store apps based on a "freemium" model.

So what will 2012 bring us? Some Marmalade experts and community members tell us their predictions.

First, our Marmalade experts share their insights:

EVP of Product Tamir Strauss says "HTML5-only apps will continue to struggle with provisioning, discovery and performance issues, which will send developers searching for hybrid solutions to harness the power of the app stores and mitigate the standard’s limitations whilst enjoying the increased productivity it offers."

Developer Services Manager Rod Burns says "We are going to see Amazon's Appstore become an important revenue stream for developers. Early sales of Kindle Fire devices are extremely promising and there is huge market potential. Kindle Fire users cannot access the Android Market so there is a captive market for developers through the Amazon Appstore."

Marmalade Developer Evangelist DeVaris Brown says "The tablet wars will escalate as more companies try to tap into this exponentially growing market, with Windows 8 set to introduce further fragmentation and challenges for developers."

CTO Tim Closs says "Savvy developers will start to realise that the combined opportunity amongst dozens of secondary app stores can equal or exceed that of the crowded mainstream stores. Distribution services that can help developers exploit this long tail of app stores will get increasing traction."

Marmalade Product Manager Tony Waters says "With quad core processor based devices coming soon we will see some incredible performance and graphics in mobile games on tablet devices."

So what do our Marmalade community members think will be the big things for 2012?

Mat Hopwood from Pocketeers, makers of Battleballz says "I think that 2012 will be the year of the tablet (mainly Android). This surge will be mainly down to price drops to fall in line with Amazon's Kindle Fire and marked increase in quality."

Dave Allanson, from Albinopixel maker of PowerDown says "It is going to be interesting to see how HTML5 starts to emerge for cross platform development, opening up app development to a lot more developers. This also goes hand in hand with the inevitable increase in social gaming in 2012."

Dave Reed, maker of Little Acorns published by Chillingo says “I predict a very high resolution iPad 3 appearing, a challenging platform for developers. I also hope for WP7/8 supporting native code!”

Alex Darby, maker of Star Armada says “I predict that indie Android developers will be able to earn more from the Amazon Appstore than the Android market.”

John Peters, CEO of Team Krinoid and maker of Syz:EG tells us “With the iPad 3, quad-core tablets, and cloud gaming services such as Onlive coming to tablets, tablets are quickly starting to rival dedicated gaming devices such as the 3DS, PS Vita, and even home consoles.”

What do you think will happen in 2012?