A startup, called Skyward mobile, claims that it can produce high level applications for various phones, including old phones. Those applications were only available on high-end devices in the past.
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To deploy an application across all the major North American operators, a developer would have to create about 100 different versions to cover different devices, says Allen Lau, CTO and cofounder of Tira Wireless, a company that specializes in helping large developers such as Yahoo adapt applications to the mobile market. On top of that, Lau says, different carriers have different requirements, so developers often have to build multiple versions of an application to support even a single popular handset.
Skyward mobile says that, by using APX, the company doesn't have to individually convert each application to each supported handset. "If you think about the landscape of handsets as being this horribly bumpy terrain," De Bonet says, "you can think of what we do as troweling, the way a plasterer makes a wall smooth." When a customer downloads a Skyward mobile application, what she's actually downloading is a thin client layer--the file is 60 kilobytes for a java-enabled phone--which compensates for a few of the issues on the device but, most important, forms a real-time link to the company's server. The intelligent server communicates with the client while the application runs, compensating for the rest of the device's issues. The server might compensate for ongoing issues, such as providing information on how to play video on a device that doesn't have a built-in system, or it might adjust for dynamic issues, such as fluctuations in available bandwidth.
