These days, every single well-known company involved in the mobile industry is embroiled in at least one patent lawsuit. Regardless of who wins the cases, Ed Hansberry writes that developers will be among some of the biggest losers. “The lack of innovation in the platform, bugs that go unfixed, and performance that’s below par can have a significant impact on a company writing software for a mobile platform,” he says. “On top of that, they run the risk of developing for a platform that could be sued out of existence or its global distribution curbed in some way.”
Enterprises, which purchase hundreds of phones and often write custom applications for those phones, face similar challenges.
Hansberry says the solution is for developers and enterprises “to invest in multiple technologies.” That way if one mobile platform ceases to exist, you’ll still have the others.
