Bejeweled, DailyMotion, Digg all want a bite from that Apple mojo
With only a fraction of the audience of any other mobile platform the iPhone is attracting dedicated development the way a chic new mall with little traffic sucks in upscale retailers. Everyone wants a piece of the hype, and so branded media and many marquee Web sites are pouring iPhone Web apps into the mix just this past week. The most visible, PopCap Games’s signature game Bejeweled, rolled out yesterday and in recent days DailyMotion opened a section of its streaming video portal formatted for the mobile Safari browser. Both releases are some of the best examples of what is possible under the iPhone’s Web-only platform for third party digital media developers.
As a Sci-Tech Today piece announcing Bejeweled points out, it is challenging to develop games for a mobile platform as Web-only apps. The Bejeweled game for the iPhone is free, but other PopCap games either come with ad support or as for-pay downloads. Making a subscription gateway for a game that players can’t even keep locally on their phone could be a tough model to sell, even to those Bejeweled-addled soccer moms.
Web-based games like Bejeweled also suffer on this platform from a lack of audio. Even via its modest speaker, the iPhone has good sound, so current third party apps miss an entire, vital dimension of game design.
Despite the design and business model limitations the iPhone platform has become the hip place to be. Some of the top mobile marketing agencies tell me they are already developing iPhone-friendly sites for their clients, because there is hip cred to be had from rolling out a campaign or a branded destination even for a few hundred thousand people. By loudly asnnouncing an iPhone presence, these companies somehow are telling mobile content surfers that they “get it” in that new and exciting way that the iPhone itself “gets” mobile users.
I would argue that there is more than a simple “halo effect” going on here. Whether or not these iPhone products reach a vast audience on such a minority platform, the design decisions that the iPhone platform encourages on these apps will only serve to improve mobile content development generally. Both Digg and DailyMotion deployments use very clean and efficient designs to offer users vast catalogs of user-generated material in compact formats. By designing for this platform, content developers are exploring intersting ways of making the phone a better content browsing platform.
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This post was written by Michael Stroud on July 31, 2007
