With mobile apps, it’s indies, corporate and enterprise IT

If you’re building applications for mobile devices, are you an indie, a corporate or an enterprise IT developer? The mobile world is trifurcating into those specific communities.

I spent most of this week at Microsoft MIX, the company’s annual technical conference for Web developers. This year, the event had a huge concentration on both Silverlight and Windows Phone 7. There’s a connection between the two, of course: Windows Phone 7 appears to be mainly a delivery platform for Silverlight applications.

Looking forward, I see three hot mobile apps platforms: Apple’s iPhone and iPad (which share the same SDK and programming model), Google’s Android and Windows Phone.

iPhone has a huge first-mover advantage because of its incredible head start. Even so, developers chafe under Apple’s tight control over the distribution channel (the iTunes Store). Android is still ramping up, but version 2.1 of the SDK has captured a lot of attention from open-source developers. Windows Phone 7 won’t ship for many months and breaks the app model used with Windows Mobile 6.5. Still, because it uses familiar tools like Visual Studio, I predict that it’ll become popular with Microsoft developers.

That brings us to the indie, corporate and enterprise IT question.

The iPhone/iPad business model is focused on supporting two main groups of developers, which I’ll call corporate and indie, but not enterprise IT developers.

Corporate: large companies are writing apps that tie into their mainline businesses, such as the news reader from the New York Times, the Facebook mobile app, Amazon’s Kindle reader, and so-on. Those corporate developers see the apps as a way to serve their customer base – as an adjunct, perhaps, to their website.

Indie: To independent developers, the mobile app is the primary product used to make money. Often, there’s a “lite” free version which is meant to entice the customer to buy a paid version. Sometimes, the app is free and the developer tries to make money selling ads. Either way, the app is the product.

Enterprise IT: Apple’s iTunes distribution model is designed for selling or giving away software to consumers. It’s not appropriate for a company to build applications to be used by its employees only. If enterprise developers want to support employees with iPhone or iPad, they should use a tuned website, not a native app. That makes the iPhone/iPad less than ideal as an IT platform.

The Android platform is compelling to indies and enterprise IT developers because there’s no Apple-style restriction on app distribution. It’s great for building custom software for employees and partners. It’s also very appealing to indie developers who want to build apps that Apple doesn’t want to stock in its store for either quality or content reasons. Plus, it’s fine for corporate developers to create Android apps that support their other business interests. The biggest weakness is the lack of a central marketing machine (like the Apple iTunes Store) to drive revenue for indies. So, while we’ll see lots of Android apps, we’re unlikely to see as much developer revenue.

Windows 7 will be more like Android than iPhone. It should prove especially popular with enterprise IT departments because they will find it easiest to build, deploy and manage apps on Windows Phone devices. Plus, Microsoft is unparalleled in supporting enterprise IT developers with tools, training and third-party ecosystem partners. If the phone sells well, it will also be attractive to corporate developers. For indies, much depends on how strong Microsoft’s marketing programs are – beyond the Xbox, Microsoft has little track record there, and its attempts to build a business around the Zune have been disappointing.

So tell me: Are you an indie, a corporate or an enterprise IT developer? What’s your take on iPhone/iPad, Android and Windows Phone?