OS wars heat up

With approximately 5-10 operating system (OS) platforms across the major vendors - including Apple's iPhone OS, Google's Android, Microsoft's Windows Mobile, Nokia's Maemo and Symbian's S60, Palm's WebOS and RIM's BlackBerry OS - 2009 saw a dizzying array of choice for consumers and, more importantly to platform momentum, developers.

Importantly, however, the confusion has brought a good measure of healthy competition and innovation to market, with Google snatching 'most improved OS' of 2009 and Palm pioneering a truly web-based development approach to mobile applications. While Symbian continued to lead in market share, despite dropping percentage points, public-facing development appeared stagnant as the newly formed Symbian Foundation found its feet, prompting parent Nokia to shift its high-end 'mobile computing' focus away from Symbian's S60 and towards Maemo, later acknowledging the former's poor match to today's UI requirements at its recent Capital Markets Day. Most recently announced as a potential contender for the mid-range is the Samsung Bada platform, bringing control over software innovation back into the vendor's own ballpark. From a developer standpoint, some vendors worked to ease the pain of OS fragmentation, offering cross-platform SDKs.

In 2010, we expect consolidation in the OS platform market as vendors streamline their portfolios and focus development efforts. Third-party development will, of course, fuel and ultimately define which platforms sink and swim in this arena. In particular, we believe operators will push for (or initiate) consolidated application storefronts and billing given the ever-growing plethora of options today; this will only be helped by a thinning of choices at the OS level. Initiatives such as the ability to use carrier billing for Android Market purchases will thrive.

On the side of the core OS, key priorities for 2010 will include the continued evolution of social networking, to the extent of the full integration of services similar to FourSquare and Gowalla, as well as fully location-aware devices with the benefit of switching modes based on a GPS location or connectivity options. This will be augmented by the next strides into mapping. We also see a push towards higher-definition entertainment and media. Content wrappers such as the iTunes LP could well make their way to mobile, particularly as a method of selling entertainment packages in the round, across film, music, books and more.

(This article is part of a series of predictions for 2010 from the GSMA Intelligence team.)