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Yahoo unveils mobile middleware platform to counter OS fragmentation

Territories covered

Western Europe

Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK,

Central and Eastern Europe

Hungary, Poland,

North America

Canada, USA,

Asia-Pacific

China, India, Japan, South Korea,

Published: 24-Sep-08

Yahoo has unveiled the first applications built on Yahoo Blueprint, a development platform that allows for the rapid creation of mobile-friendly websites or for Java, Windows Mobile and Symbian. Until now, Yahoo had offered developers the opportunity to develop widgets for its 'Yahoo Go' application. Yahoo already used Blueprint for developing some of its own mobile applications.

Our take...
The platform move can be seen as an attempt by Yahoo to take advantage of the fragmentation at a time when the mobile OS market is evolving rapidly. Microsoft, Google and Nokia all invest heavily in competing operating systems. The Blueprint platform enables Yahoo to maintain an OS-agnostic stance.
Although market fragmentation will be addressed, applications can only be as strong as the SDK and might oversee specific features of higher-end phones (e.g touch screens).
A promising aspect is the opportunity to build stand-alone applications for multiple OSes, which might prove compelling for smaller developers willing to reduce development costs but keep control of distribution. Whether many developers will commit to another platform remains unclear because all OSes already push aggressively for development on their respective platforms. The iPhone OS, Blackberry and Android have some financial incentives (funds or competitions) in place to support development for their platforms.