Someone best characterized application vs. platform in just a dozen words, as follows: A good application never surprises, a good platform never stops to surprise (I’d love to give proper credits, if someone is kind enough to provide me the citation).

I continue to be quite impressed with the two smartphone platforms that I dug into, iPhone and Android. They never stop to surprise me on the positive side with their nuggets of enabling technology.

I do have quite a few issues with their applications and the way they are written. Alas, they surprise me when and where they really shouldn’t. Here’s a list of 10 top of mind issues in no particular order:

1. Unexpected entitlements. Some applications are more equal than others. For instance, try signing-out from your primary gmail account on Android. It won’t work unless the whole device is wiped clean;
2. Power efficiency. Some applications turn the radio on very often and can even be quite chatty whenever they do so. In absence of a “green rating” for applications, it’s a trial and error process of loading some applications and then discovering that battery autonomy has suddenly tanked compliments of a “fat” application in that mix;
3. Applications work unless they don’t. It’s hard to know why an application suddenly gets into the habit of aborting launch. It silently goes back to being a cute square icon, ready to fail again just the same;
4. Stale coding practices. The application development environments don’t leverage any of the new ideas in software engineering, like Ruby on Rails with its built-in unit/functional testing;
5. Bloomingdale’s and the bazaar. Paraphrasing E. Raymond, there seem to be just two styles of application store emerging: the exclusive velvety one (iTunes, Ovi) and the open messy one (Android). It would be nice to see some hybrid concepts emerging. It will be a pity if the smartphone software channels are already fully ossified this early in the game;
6. Password sprawl. Without a widespread identity infrastructure, I’m forced to set passwords in as many different applications and have their renewal/challenges hanging on me. Intriguingly, the latter too change in frequency and style with the application, thus making it a really fragmented experience and a race towards lower grade security policies (i.e., simple passwords with the longest expiration intervals possible);
7. Back-end password handling. Without a widespread identity infrastructure, chances are that for a given application the database of subject’s secrets and the subject’s application data get collocated into the same Cloud and the same logical slice therein. This is what my colleague Gunnar Peterson colorfully describes as loading dynamite and detonator onto the same truck;
8. Porous sandboxes. The sandbox that an application operates in has several back-alley read/write access pathways to free-for-all data (e.g., the keyboard cache and address book on the iPhone, as described here), thus creating opportunities for Trojans and covert channels;
9. Panta rei. After I stumble upon a really clever application and make it part of my daily life, it’s quite likely that another vendor will pick on the same good idea and apply some healthy one-upmanship to improve it. Thus, I regularly have the dilemma, whether to stick to the data accrued thus far or start fresh on a brand new application, without any migration capability in sight;
10. Cloakers and phishers. Some applications mean big business and naturally attract ill-intentioned copycats. There are just so many pixels to copy. Current defenses are mainly non-technical – e.g., the presence in the iTune store hinges on relationships between vendor, Apple, and the user community. They are not as effective in the bazaar style of application store.

I don’t believe in the rise of mobile multi-platform application frameworks (other than WebKit, that is), nor do I believe in unicorns.

However, I’m firmly convinced that smartphones will pull through advances in software – be it on gadget, on cloud, or identity infrastructure  – much as they have already done for the 3G telco infrastructure.

My former colleagues have chosen to publish SILK in an IETF Internet-Draft. I can only imagine how this new resolve must have stirred some discussion among stakeholders. My kudos for the final outcome!

I cannot think of a more deserving recipient of the ACM Turing award than Chuck Thacker. I was actually surprised that he hadn’t been considered before for this high recognition. I’ve been tuned to his brilliant work since the days that I’ve studied the Alto at school. I chronicled my 2008 visit to Chuck and his research team at MSR SV here.

NOTE. In truth, the award announced today is a 2009 award. The title’s allitteration was too good to pass on though…

Like in a Petri dish, I keep observing how the iPhone single-handedly pulls the roadmap of a telco infrastructure. Both iPhone and AT&T wireless infrastructure are expanding at torrid pace and beyond the wildest imagination (to an outside observer like me at least). The reaction is amplified by Apple’s single-track mind to perfect a user experience and their exclusive deal with a carrier – in short, a monoculture. No ounce of pull force gets lost. The 1-2 jolt that has developed from Apple to AT&T is a new baseline for textbooks.

A recent report confirms that AT&T has done good in its intent to improve its 3G download/upload throughput. Improvements stem from the roll-out of HSPA 7.2 (besides the sheer new capacity thrown at the problem). Broad technology advances in beamforming, multiple-input multiple-output communications (MIMO) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing hint that there’s quite a headroom for further scale-outs over the next 3-5 years.

I’ve sampled the AT&T improvements directly using the excellent, free Xtreme Speedtest application. For extra credit, I can go multi-platform and run this same application at the same place and time on both my iPhone/AT&T and Droid/Verizon. The speed of a web browsing session would otherwise be highly subjective and dominated by the browser’s own effectiveness.

In a previous blog, I described the “wheel of innovation” looping over the following steps:

1. New infrastructure build-outs
2. Leading to faster/broader connectivity
3. Making it a breeding ground for new applications
4. Some of them reaching viral spread, network effect, etc. resulting in larger addressable markets
5. Thus creating demand for more/different infrastructure

(loop back to 1.)

We have gone from step 5 to steps 1 to 2 (even though I have no basis to comment on coverage – I will steer clear of blue vs. red maps…) Now that the infrastructure shortcomings are beyond us, along with troubling rumors of usage tarifs, I’m eager to see a new breed of applications (steps 3 and 4).

In a subsequent post, I will share my wish list on what iPhone and smartphones in general can and should pull through in software infrastructure.