Developers: Ignoring other platforms could be bad for your health
Have you checked out instagr.am on the iPhone, the photo sharing/manipulation application?
Well, the developers of instagr.am (who just nabbed $7m) haven’t bothered with other mobile platforms as yet.
Conventional wisdom is that you do iPhone first. Then 6 months later, you think about Android. Then about a year later — and only after you’ve been lobbied hard by other platform owners — do you bother launching a RIM/Nokia/WP7/Bada version.
This is fine as long as the market plays along.
Instagr.am has some competition on Windows Phone 7 as MobileCrunch reports:
After growing tired of waiting for any of these picture sharing services to come to them, they built one of their own: bubblegum. And yes, it has the silly filters.
Launching later today (on Windows Phone 7 only, for now), Bubblegum was built by Sriram Krishnan (Program Manager for Microsoft’s Windows Azure) and Aarthi Ramamurthy (Program Manager for Microsoft’s XNA) in their nights and weekends off. Bonus trivia, mainly because it’s kind of cool: Sriram and Aarthi aren’t just partners in this endeavor — they’re also partners in love. In other words, they’re married.
via Bubblegum Fills A Niche, Brings Instagram-esque Photo Sharing To Windows Phone 7.
Yup, another team of developers has taken a look at instagr.am and thought, ‘nice’. Boom. The app is live.
This is potentially hugely dangerous for the original developers who, having cracked iPhone could well be a little too late to the party on other platforms.
The jury is most definitely out with Bubblegum, the WP7 instagr.am competitor, but if you’re using a device on WP7, chances are you’ll want to check out Bubblegum.
Now and again I’ve been hunting through BlackBerry’s App World to see if any bright spark has released an instagr.am clone for that platform. Not yet it seems, but it’s only a matter of time.
I wonder how long it will be before developers begin releasing on all platforms simultaneously to prevent/reduce the effects of this kind of approach?
