We are building an Enterprise Web application that can be accessed publicly and we need to support *most mobile devices (more than 90% on the market). Specifically a part of it is an E-book viewer and Audio / Video streaming and viewer.
Requirements specifically says:
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Should support Blackberry and Android
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Should support more than 90% of mobile devices. The requirements were written when there was no iPad/iPhone yet, so it is a must that we support it now.
Questions:
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Which specific platform/device to support for this service?
- Requirement #2 is a bit vague so I think it can be negotiated. But any idea which specific platform to support aside from Android, BB, iOS. Maybe you could share some statistics if you have the information.
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And what strategy/technology to use to save effort for supporting both mobile and desktop web.
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I.e. Is it better to have separate development for mobile and desktop support? Or use a framework (any recommendation?) that unifies both desktop / mobile web application. I know this question is a bit vague, maybe some of you already had a similar experience that you could share.
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For technology, ebook and a/v viewer are arguably mostly built on Flash. One major problem: iOS and older mobile support. Youtube and Vimeo are already in a “transitional state” for HTML5 for video. Is this the trend/future? How about 3GP, is it still a must? Greatly appreciate if you could share your experiences. Thanks!
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Still in the very early stages so this is more of a brainstorming prior to SA&D.
Technologies: Wowza, DSpace, Liferay, Flash, HTML5
It’s an odd note that the specifications don’t include iPhone and do include Android, yet iPhone came before Android.
Anyway, you will get a high proportion of the smartphone market if you support these (in approximately this order):
The mobile numbers I’ve seen vary significantly from one report to another so it’s hard to say conclusively what percentage you would support with this set. The most important statistic to any client is the percentage of active mobile browsers supported, not the percentage of shipped mobile browser supported. There are a lot of feature phones shipped with old browsers that are never used and perhaps never even activated with an appropriate data plan. Whereas, the latest crop of touch-screen Android, iPhone, Windows Phone smartphones are generally purchased specifically to be able to access the web when mobile and in the U.S. here, you often have to purchase a data plan in order to get any sort of reasonable price on the phones.
You can see some mobile browser marketshare trends here: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=1&qpcustomb=1. Symbian is on the list, but declining as Nokia is shifting to Windows Phone.
Here’s some data by country: http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2011/06/mobile_browser_9.html.
You can find many other data sets with some Googling.